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The plot description on my DirecTV says it all: “A rape victim refuses to cooperate.”

The show is the immensely popular NBC police procedural, Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, about a New York City squad of detectives from a fictitious New York City Police Department 16th Precinct, assigned to investigate rapes, sexual assaults, and other sexually-related crimes. The show described above is the 327th episode with an original scheduled air date of November 13, 2013.

Cast of Law & Order: SVU
Cast of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit

But how does that plot description even make sense? Isn’t rape, by definition, such that if there is consent by a person over the “age of consent,” there could be no rape? And that means that the general plot description of “A rape victim refuses to cooperate” would apply to every rape?

Logic dictates that refusal to cooperate lies elsewhere.

And it does. It is the police investigation that the victim is refusing to cooperate with.

But if the victim is not laying a charge of rape before the police to begin with, how is there even a crime for the Special Victims Unit to investigate?

There is an assumption in criminal law that every television writer or producer or director or actor never questions: that the police detective, empowered with a shield and a gun issued by the government, has authority to investigate a crime regardless of the victim’s wishes. There is an eminent domain, or nationalization, of crime, such that the victim is no longer the private person but the State.

The very concept of “criminal” as opposed to “tort” law demands this assumption. In suits at common law not involving a breach of contract, a private person claiming to have been damaged by another person sues in court for a monetary award in reparation of the damages.

But in criminal law a crime committed by Party A against Party B substitutes a third party — the State — as a new Party C. This substitution does not require the consent of the actual, real-world victim — Party B. The State does not need to compensate Party B in any way; Party B is on his or her own to pursue damages in a civil lawsuit which is not in any way paid for by the State. The State is not obligated to provide a lawyer to the victim, nor pay for deposition of witnesses or expert witnesses, and if the lawsuit fails the victim might be additionally damaged by the State with a bill for court costs.

Yet, in the State’s pursuit of Party A for the crime against Party B, the State uses taxpayer funds to pay police to investigate, and prosecutors to charge and try, Party A — then to apply punishment upon conviction to Party A, also at taxpayer expense.

The idiocy and injustice of the concept of criminal “justice” where the real-world victim is nothing but an unwilling spectator is so apparent that in recent years criminal trials often involve “victim impact statements” and the attempt to redirect a modicum of reparation from the offender to the real victim. Nonetheless, the primary victim in criminal law is the State, sometimes euphemized as The People.

This bullshit is what makes anarchists and Agorists. Anarchists and Agorists see the nudity behind this Emperor’s New Clothes scheme that dwarfs any Ponzi scheme committed by a Bernie Madoff.

And now, you who are not an anarchist or Agorist, may see it too, and realize how everyday television is so fish-in-water that this Larceny of Crime isn’t even questioned.

Morality demands that a crime victim not be revictimized with a second crime by depriving the victim of the sole right to determine whether or not to proceed with a claim against the attacker, and to define in a claim what might be an attempt at reparation.

Of course some crimes are so heinous that no reparation can be made. It’s the flimflam of inventing the concept of punishment inflicted upon a perpetrator by the State that we all become victims of State Larceny — a theft of victimhood that only total abolition of any “Law & Order” separate from a victim’s individual rights and conducted by a criminal conspiracy of police and prosecutors can begin to correct. And these moral criminals being made heroes in Statist Propaganda TV is how the flimflam is made Unquestionable.

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