Olivia+Benson

= Detective Olivia Benson =

Biography


Mariska Hargitay as Detective Olivia Benson in Dick Wolfe’s Law & Order Special Victims Unit effectively develops and grows a strong relationship with her character as an officer so severely traumatized by her own origins as the offspring of her mother’s rape which stood in the way of any longstanding romantic involvement with any man in her personal life. This prompted an extreme level of empathy with the victims of sex crimes. She never knew her father and was raised by her mother who was an alcoholic. Olivia has always possessed an incredible ability to connect with victims of rape and sympathize with them. She knows how to gain their trust and how to help them find some kind of comfort and some peace of mind. In Olivia’s mind, she takes it seriously that the victims always come first and is always fighting for them, and what she thinks is right. Her partner in New York City’s Special Victims Unit is Elliot Stabler who is very short tempered. Olivia’s calm and peaceful personality balances out their partnership and makes them a remarkable team. As time passes, Olivia learns of a man named Simon Marsden, whose name came up in an investigation. He turned out to be the son of her father, and her half brother. She later learns that there is a possibility that her father might not have raped her mother, and that her father was always making sure his daughter was okay while watching over her from a far. Simon was accused of rape himself and Olivia had to prove her brother's innocence, when she realized that her brother never hurt anyone. Olivia and her partner Elliot share a strong mutual friendship. She calls Elliot her best friend and even helped to deliver Elliot’s son, after Olivia and Elliot’s wife Kathy were involved in a traffic accident together. Olivia is not a mother herself, even though she works well children. She wants children and even looked into her options. One of which was an adoption agency who turned her down due to the face that she is single, had no family support system, and worked all hours of the day. Olivia has a somewhat long and odd list of boyfriends: one who was a homosexual and contracted HIV a while after they dated, another was a newspaper reporter who asked her to act out a rape fantasy, and another who was a newspaper editor who wanted her to move in with him. Olivia claims that Elliot is “the longest relationship that she has ever had with a man (Splinter & Bellatrix),” and is the only detective who has never been married. Benson, since working with SVU has been held hostage, had her throat slit, stalked three times, and has been attacked on many more occasions. When she went undercover in Sealview, a woman’s prison to catch a male corrections officer who raped the daughter of one of the inmates was the worst of all her attacks. The guard took her down to the basement of the prison, where he groped, verbally and physically harassed her, and sexually assaulted her by trying to force her to give him oral sex. Because of the attack, Olivia contracted Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. Since her attack in prison, Olivia learned how to deal with her PTSD and her sexual assault and has moved on, while still fighting for victims of sexual assault.

__ Psychoanalytic Perspective:  __ Detective Olivia Benson was the product of her mother’s rape. As a result of that, she grew up with the everlasting burden of what she was and how she was conceived. She didn’t know who her father (her mother’s rapist) was. She grew up with her mother who became an alcoholic, in which she used her drinking as a way to cope with her rape. Her mother’s alcoholism took its toll on her body that she later died after falling down a flight of stairs. Olivia grew up believing that she was a burden to her mom and that her mom would never be able to cope with her rape due to the fact that every day she had to look into Olivia’s face. Because of what she knew about her mother’s past and about herself, she decided to become a police officer and requested that she be placed in New York City’s Special Victims Unit, where the main cases are rape, child molestation, abuse, etc. She became fixated on the subject of rape and worked hard to find and put rapists to jail and provide the victims with some sense of relief and most of all justice. She works well with her victims with allowing them to gain trust in her and knows how to comfort them. Olivia took it upon herself to look back into her mother’s file and reinvestigate her mother’s rape to find out who her father was. She was never sure if she found her real father and finally decided to let the case go. One of Olivia’s defense mechanisms that she uses as a way to deal with her life situation, her feelings, and the reality of what her job requires of her is her sense of projection. She always projects her anxiety provoking thoughts or impulses onto others especially when she is interrogating the criminal. When she is interrogating the criminal, she has a tendency to tell the perpetrator how he or she was feeling at the time they were committing the crime. For example, she would tell them that they wanted to feel in power, or be in control, or they may have felt angry or upset which may have triggered them to act out their impulses even more. She projects these feeling onto the perpetrator, when majority of the time, she herself has these feelings. It’s obvious that based on her mother’s past, she wished she could have somehow had control over her mother’s situation or wished her mother herself could have controlled what happened to her. With Olivia now working at SVU, she now wishes she could have control over protecting the victims and keeping them out of harm’s way. She also feels much anger about her mother’s past, and towards the criminals that she deals with on a day to day basis. She is always suspicious of others, especially men, or those who are accused of rape, of molestation, or some sexual violent act upon others even if they deny the accusation. She wastes no time in trying to find out what really happened and in wanting to believe the victims. She always sticks to her gut feelings even when her other colleagues may or may not believe the victims story or believe that the victims are lying. She also has a form of displacement. She is not strongly committed to men and being in a relationship. It is very hard for her to keep a long lasting relationship and the thought of getting married is too much for her all because to a certain extent, she has something against men. Because she has a fear of what happened to her mom happening to her, she takes it out on her relationships with men. She lacks commitment in her relationships to these guys who are supposed to love and care for her, because she fears that one day they might get up and hurt her. She fights to put rapists behind bars, and makes it seem as though she is not afraid of them when in reality however, she does posses some fear of being raped herself. While working undercover in Sealview Women’s Correctional Facility to find a male prison officer who had raped one of the inmates’ daughters, Olivia herself was sexually assaulted by the police officer. As a result of her attack, she began to experience posttraumatic stress, and was then diagnosed with Posttraumatic Stress Disorder. She began to experience more anxiety, nightmare and sleep difficulties, and continued failed relationships. As a result of her experience in the prison, she had a lot of fear and anxiety that was pushed into her unconscious. She was however, able to overcome her situation and got a better handle on how to deal with her assault through therapy as well as confiding in her long lasting partner Elliot Stabler. Her friendship and relationship with Elliot is the only male that she has ever trusted so much and the only male she has ever had such a long relationship with.

__ Humanistic Perspective: __ Olivia had a personal choice. She chose to become a police officer and work in the Special Victims Unit. She knows this will bring her much anxiety, but at the same time it allows her to overcome her past, and her fears and gains some self-fulfillment. She chose to take control and find meaning in her life, rather than letting her past control her. Olivia because of what she knew about herself made the choice to reach out to others who are going through what she and her mother went through. Through this logotherapy approach, Olivia tries to find meaning of her existence. Olivia Benson is a self-actualized person. She knows her potential and knows that she is good at her job and working with victims. Olivia Benson had one of many basic internal drives: justice. She wanted to find and put away rapists and provide their victims with the justice they deserve. This became one of her basic primary drives because of how she grew up and what she grew up knowing about her mother. It became something that was instilled in her. Through the Social Learning Theory, Olivia learned how to respond to rape situations in certain ways. Not only does she learn how to avoid a rape situation herself but she also knows how to teach it to others. Her feelings of anxiety towards rape motivate her to act in certain ways: more assertive, aggressive, etc. because she wouldn’t want that to happen to her. When she finds herself in a situation like that, her behavior changes, to a more aggressive persona to get herself out of the situation. Benson also had one main drive conflict. Growing up she internalized her mother’s rape, and the fact that her mother became a drunk and died because of it, that she blamed everything all on herself. She blames herself for her mother’s addiction to alcohol, because she believed that if her mother didn’t have to see her everyday as a reminder that she was raped, she would have never turned to alcohol and she wouldn’t have died. Benson then developed this internal conflict, where she would focus all her attention on sexual assault. She developed this obsession with putting rapists behind bars and feels as though it’s her obligation. She feels as though it’s something she has to do because she feels a sense of guilt because of what happened to her mother. When Benson gets so wrapped up in a case, she doesn’t even take the time out to get rest for herself. She prefers to work day and night to solve the case. In situations with young children, she gets so attached and cares about nothing more than to provide them with a sense of safety again. She loves children and gets so emotionally attached to children who are the victims of sexual abuse. It is obvious that sometimes Benson would prefer to have the perpetrator dead and she sometimes wishes that upon them. She develops this approach-avoidant conflict, where she is drawn to and away from the situation. She hates to look at rapist and does not like to be in the same room with them, while at the same, she is preoccupied with putting them in prison. Benson believes that this is what she was meant to do from the moment she learned what had happened to her mother.

__ Discussion:  __ Detective Olivia Benson, is a very sensitive, kind and caring detective who is extremely sensitive to the topic of rape. Not only has she undergone sexual assault herself, she is also the product of her mother’s rape. Because of what has happened to her and what she learned about her past, she has committed herself to putting rapists in prison. She is very well experienced and knows how to talk to her rape victims. She knows how to comfort them and gain their trust. Even though she is very good at her job, it is still a struggle for her every day. She never knows what she is going to be faced with everyday as she goes into work. Because of her difficult position, she has developed a few defense mechanisms to help her deal with her everyday life. She holds strong to her opinions and projects her suspicions and feelings on to others. She is not afraid to say what she things whether she thinks she’s right or wrong. Her form of displacement keeps her from keeping any long-term relationships with men because she believes they will eventually hurt her. Though she fights rapists to put them in jail, she still has a fear herself of being raped. One of her basic internal drives is to provide victims with the justice they deserve. She believes that this is what she is meant to do, and it brings meaning into her life. Through the social learning theory, the environment that she was raised in and seeing how difficult it was for her mom to cope, she knows that this is not something she would want to experience herself, nor would she want anyone else to experience it either. This is why she chose to dedicate herself to solving sex crimes and offering help and protection to her victims. Detective Olivia Benson is one of the NYP’s most devoted and well liked detectives. She is good at what she does, and knows how to work with her victims and provide them with some relief.

· Splinter_Spy, Bellatrixs_Wand_Arm. 2010. Biography for Detective Olivia Benson from Law & Order Special Victims Unit 1999. [] · Eosvuaddictx. 2009. Olivia Benson-Hammered & Her Mother. []