In the criminal justice system,sexually based offenses are considered especially heinous.
In New York City, the dedicated detectives who investigate these vicious felonies are membersof an elite squad known as the Special Victims Unit.These aretheirstories.
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The couches, tables, sofas, and plush carpet-covered floor make the living room look cozy. It is a place where residents and visitors alike can feel at home. Easter decorations hang from the wall.
Sitting on a black leather sofa, Noah Porter-Benson looks at the colored plastic Easter eggs he gathered this morning.
"Did you like the Easter Egg hunt, Noah?" asks his mother, Olivia Benson.
"Yesh," replies the young boy.
"So you heading back to New York today?" asks an older, teenage boy.
"Yeah," answers Benson. "It's gonna be a four hour trip."
She and Noah accepted an invitation to attend Easter weekend with Calvin Arliss and his grandparents in Vermont. Olivia had quite a history with the family, as she, due to unusual circumstances, had been Calvin's foster guardian for a few months a few years ago. He had only been nine years old then.
The teenage boy hands Olivia a Nikon Coolpix B500 digital camera. "care to take another picture before you guys go?" he asks.
"Sure," replies Olivia.
Calvin lies on the floor and with arms and legs bent. "I'm doing this for this hashtag ShawnBeDead."
"Shawn be what?"
"ShawnBeDead. It is just people posing on the floor, pretending to be dead. A lot of people on Twitter and InstaGram have done it. My grandma and grandpa say I'm too young for an iPhone or something like but, they let me upload pictures into that computer over there."
Olivia glances at a Lenovo desktop computer sitting in the corner of the living room. "Under their supervision, of course."
"Yeah."
Olivia presses the button to take the picture.
"I'm going to take one of Noah as well," she says.
Oooooooooo
About two hundred sixty miles away, a woman in her early thirties had prepared a quick lunch for her family. The lunch consists of a quick appetizer of mushrooms stuffed with crab meat and bacon bits.
She calls for her children, and they all come except one. She calls out the name of her daughter.
She opens a door leading to her daughter's bedroom. The bedroom looks like a typical teenage girl's bedroom, with a bed and a shelf and posters of singers popular with today's youth.
But the mother pays little attention to the layout of the room.
Her attention is on her daughter's bleeding wrists.