Custody Battles 16 Law & Order: Special Victims Unit episodes
Parents fighting over their children, where accusations of abuse become weapons in court.
- Season 2 · Episode 4
Legacy
A seven-year-old with a history of hidden injuries lies in a coma while the detectives sort through her father, stepfather, stepbrother and mother.
- Season 3 · Episode 3
Stolen
A baby snatched from a grocery store leads detectives to a shady adoption lawyer and to a boy kidnapped in 1989, now being raised by a family that never knew.
- Season 4 · Episode 18
Desperate
A six-year-old boy is the only witness to his stepmother’s rape and murder, and the detectives must reach him while his father, the prime suspect, keeps him from them.
- Season 6 · Episode 1
Birthright
An attempt to snatch a little girl from a playground leads to a woman convinced the child is hers, and to a fertility doctor who gave away embryos without consent.
- Season 7 · Episode 11
Alien
A Catholic schoolboy’s stabbing leads to an eight-year-old girl with two mothers, and her grandparents use the case to try to take her from the woman who raised her.
- Season 8 · Episode 2
Clock
A 17-year-old who looks like a child disappears from a school trip, and Stabler finds she has run off with a 30-year-old man the law cannot touch.
- Season 8 · Episode 11
Burned
A mother accuses her estranged husband of rape during a bitter custody fight, and the case divides Benson and Stabler until it ends in fire.
- Season 9 · Episode 9
Paternity
A nanny’s murder exposes a marriage built on secrets and a boy whose father is not his biological parent, while Kathy Stabler’s baby arrives after a car crash.
- Season 10 · Episode 14
Transitions
The beating of a repo man outside a strip club draws the squad into his family’s fight over his transgender daughter’s medical care.
- Season 11 · Episode 24
Shattered
A boy is snatched from a Manhattan street, and suspicion falls on his mother, an anthropologist who lost custody and wanted to take him abroad.
- Season 12 · Episode 10
Rescue
A partygoer’s death exposes paramedics who prey on patients, while Benson’s search for Vivian Arliss threatens her guardianship of Calvin.
- Season 14 · Episode 18
Legitimate Rape
A sports reporter raped and stalked by her cameraman becomes pregnant, and the man she accuses turns the trial and then family court against her.
- Season 16 · Episode 22
Parents' Nightmare
When an eight-year-old is taken from school and held for ransom, SVU has to work out which of his divorced parents set up the abduction.
- Season 18 · Episode 8
Chasing Theo
A six-year-old disappears from his bed during his mother’s late-night party, and the hunt runs through her ex-wife, her violent ex-boyfriend and finally the nanny who raised him.
- Season 19 · Episode 9
Gone Baby Gone
Noah is abducted from a Manhattan mall, and Benson discovers that his grandmother, Sheila Porter, planned the kidnapping.
- Season 19 · Episode 19
Sunk Cost Fallacy
A woman and her young daughter disappear after a frantic phone call, and the case against the husband collapses when Benson finds them alive under Alex Cabot’s protection.