Many people think that too much attention and resources are given to the protection of wild animals and birds. Do you agree or disagree?

I started watching

SVU

because Ronald Reagan died in the summer of 2004. Normally I watched the news during the sweltering afternoons between my morning and evening jobs, but I had no patience for the days-long live coverage of Reagan’s funeral festivities as his casket traveled around the country. Fortunately for me, Law and Order:

SVU

was always playing on the USA Network. I fell in love with Olivia Benson and her authoritative blazers, her commitment to believing victim-survivors and her ferocious drive for justice, with the

show

’s diverse range of storylines about abuse and sexual

violence

that appealed to me as a gender studies major with a commitment to fighting gender-based

violence

. Sixteen years later, I research sexual

violence

in the Middle Ages for a living, and

SVU

is the longest-running primetime drama on American television. I am aware of the

show

’s deeply problematic elements

—

its propensity for ever-more-outrageous narratives ripped from the headlines, the fact that it fictionalizes real-life trauma without victims’

consent

, its troubling abortion politics, its portrayal of incarceration as the ideal form of

rape

justice, and its valorization of the

police

, which is its most glaring fiction, particularly given our country’s long, ugly history of

police

sexual

violence

against women of color. I feel conflicted about deriving

this

much enjoyment from a

police

procedural, especially right now,

although

I tell myself that I am in good company. Roxane Gay repeatedly thanks the

show

in her book acknowledgments: “Thank you to Law & Order:

SVU

for always being on television so I can have something familiar in the background as I write,” she writes at the end of Hunger. What is it that makes so many women, even women who want to abolish the

police

, take comfort in

SVU

?

SVU

’s brand of pop

culture

sexual

violence

fictionalizes

rape

enough to enable viewers to enjoy fantasies — and they are indeed fantasies —of righteous allyship, of narrative closure after

rape

, of a world where victim-survivors are believed and supported, of compassionate and justice-driven

police

officers who are

also

survivors. These fantasies can be especially meaningful if you know that the portrait of disbelieving, dismissive

police

response in shows

such

as Netflix’s Unbelievable (2019) is the more realistic one. These consoling fictions give us a glimpse of what a

culture

that takes sexual

violence

seriously might look like. As

SVU

’s

show

-runner recently said, “I think that the audience is sophisticated enough to know that

this

is not the day-to-day reality [in policing sexual assault]. I think people wish it were more like [it is on

SVU

]. I think I wish it were more like

this

.”

SVU

’s use of sexual

violence

as thought-provoking entertainment,

however

, isn’t new at all. Medieval people had their own brand of

SVU

-esque pop

culture

sexual

violence

, in the form of popular short poems called

pastourelles

that feature fictionalized narratives about

rape

and

consent

. Some

pastourelles

survive with musical notation, showing that they were transmitted orally and sung by people regardless of whether they could read, giving them the potential for mass consumption comparable to

SVU

’s status as a network

show

accessible to anyone with a television.

Pastourelles

have a familiar structure: A powerful

man

encounters a

peasant

woman

alone in a secluded outdoor location. He propositions her. She declines. He refuses to take no for an answer. But from there, the stories they tell vary widely, from tragedy to accommodation to revenge. In one, a knight coerces sex from a

peasant

girl by inventing a law that requires unaccompanied young women to pay a fee

—

which he knows she cannot afford

—

and forcing her to pay

this

fee with her body. In another, a

man

rapes a

woman

but

then

apologizes, pledging to “heal” her “hurt” and offering to marry her as reparation. But as I hinted above, other

pastourelles

feature satisfying endings or unexpected twists. One features a

man

and a

woman

about to have consensual sex when the

man

abruptly withdraws his

consent

and the

woman

tries to pressure him until he runs away, challenging popular ideas about gender,

consent

, and coercion. Another depicts a

woman

who laughs at her would-be assailant, orders him to find someone more willing, and sends him on his way. So what did medieval audiences get out of

pastourelles

? They could enjoy satisfying fantasies of seeing predators dissuaded or humiliated, which was particularly important in a society where bringing successful

rape

charges was incredibly difficult and where many women who did press charges were later fined or imprisoned when they failed to appear in court, or when their assailants were exonerated by all-male juries. It hardly needs saying that in

this

way, at least, the medieval world was not so different from our own. And so, like today’s

SVU

viewers, medieval people — particularly those who had experienced assault, or been afraid of it — sought out ways they could witness a variety of narratives about sexual

violence

which underscore that it does not follow a single paradigm and challenge society’s pervasive silence around sexual assault, both

then

and now. Both

pastourelles

and

SVU

address a topic

that is

intimately, devastatingly familiar to far too many people, and they mix

this

real-life trauma with comforting fictions by featuring empathetic

police

officers who challenge

rape

culture

or powerful predators who are dismissed and thwarted. They acknowledge the complexity of real-life narratives of sexual

violence

—

trans sex workers attacked by wealthy lawyers;

peasant

girls raped by powerful men; victim-survivors who don’t follow the “good victim” script by ingesting drugs and alcohol, attempting to reconcile with their assailants, or failing to report the assault immediately

—

while shying away from depicting the most graphic

violence

, allowing it to occur mercifully in the gaps between scenes or stanzas. Most importantly, they

show

survivors that they are not alone, that survival and resilience are possible. In an episode from

SVU

’s recent season, Benson tells a

woman

who was gang raped while intoxicated, “You’re going to survive

this

.” “You’ve said that before, too, haven’t you?” says the

woman

. “I have,” says Benson, “because it’s true.” “How do you know?” the

woman

asks. “Because I did,” Benson replies. A

rape

survivor in a medieval pastourelle offers similar words of consolation to her fellow survivors. “I trust to recover my heart again, / And Christ’s curse go with you,” she declares after she is assaulted, cursing her attacker and looking ahead to a future of recovery. That’s not to say these genres are uncomplicated. An insidious quality of the pastourelle genre,

for instance

, is how its habit of portraying

peasant

women as victims works to portray aristocratic women as safe from sexual

violence

, even though legal records

show

that

this

was definitely not the case. And it goes without saying that

SVU

’s fantasy of protective

police

is especially dubious right now. So how do we balance these consolatory moments, offering comfort and solidarity to real-life survivors, against pop

culture

sexual

violence

’s potential harms, its powerful fictions about allies and victims? One question of

SVU

is whether it is possible to represent the

police

ethically. But another is simpler. If we see these fantasies less as offering solutions and more as excavations of ongoing problems — excavations that illuminate sexual

violence

’s myriad forms — we can see in these beloved fictions a glimpse of where

rape

justice might start, which is most basically in a radical and necessary acknowledgment.