Kidnapping & Abduction 49 Law & Order: Special Victims Unit episodes
Missing children and captive adults, and the race to find them while there is still time.
- Season 2 · Episode 15
Countdown
When an eight-year-old escapes a predator who holds girls for three days before killing them, the squad races the clock to find him before his newest captive’s time runs out.
- 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 7
Dolls
The body of a little girl found at a garbage plant sends detectives after a doll-collecting predator who has taken a second child, whose mother has just returned from drug rehab.
- Season 5 · Episode 1
Tragedy
A heavily pregnant artist disappears in what looks like a carjacking, and the detectives race to find her before a dangerous labor kills her and her baby.
- Season 5 · Episode 6
Coerced
A homeless man with untreated schizophrenia kidnaps a five-year-old he believes is his own son, and the hunt exposes both Stabler’s methods and a neglectful adult home.
- Season 5 · Episode 9
Control
A man found castrated in a subway station proves to be a serial kidnapper who kept women as “brides” in a hidden dungeon, and one of his victims is a woman Benson once failed to believe.
- 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 6 · Episode 4
Scavenger
A copycat reviving a 1970s serial killer’s riddles and methods sends the squad on a race across the city to save his next victims.
- Season 7 · Episode 10
Storm
Three Katrina orphans taken to New York by a pedophile lead the squad to a vial of stolen anthrax and a fight with federal agents over the public’s right to know.
- Season 7 · Episode 13
Blast
A girl with undiagnosed leukemia is kidnapped for ransom, and the search leads back to her own family.
- Season 7 · Episode 19
Fault
A released sex offender slaughters a family and flees with two children, and the manhunt forces Benson and Stabler to face what they would risk for each other.
- Season 8 · Episode 6
Infiltrated
While undercover with environmental activists in Oregon, Benson investigates the murder of a pharmaceutical worker and uncovers his secret, as Novak’s rape case in New York stalls without her testimony.
- Season 8 · Episode 15
Haystack
A baby taken from his crib, a mother driven to suicide by a TV reporter, and a family DNA search that leads detectives to the boy’s real father.
- Season 9 · Episode 2
Avatar
A young woman vanishes from her bed, and her avatar in an online virtual world leads the squad to an ex-convict reliving an old abduction.
- Season 10 · Episode 11
Stranger
A teenager who vanished four years earlier seems to come home, until the detectives start to doubt who she really is.
- Season 10 · Episode 13
Snatched
When a girl is snatched from her bed, suspicion moves from her paroled father to her grandfather, a legendary thief whose memory is failing.
- Season 10 · Episode 21
Liberties
A stalker uses a fantasy rape website to set up his former girlfriend, while the judge hearing his case pursues the truth about the son he lost three decades ago.
- 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 1
Locum
A ten-year-old who stages her own disappearance reveals that her adoptive parents are remaking her in the image of the daughter they lost to a kidnapper years earlier.
- Season 12 · Episode 16
Spectacle
A student broadcasts a staged rape and holds a classmate hostage to force SVU to reopen the cold case of his little brother’s abduction.
- Season 13 · Episode 16
Child's Welfare
While Benson’s half brother fights the city for his children, an abandoned newborn leads the squad to a couple who hold young women captive to bear children.
- Season 13 · Episode 18
Valentine's Day
A wife’s rape and kidnapping, witnessed by her husband over a video chat, turns into a case against the supposed victim.
- Season 13 · Episode 22
Strange Beauty
A young woman abducted in a cab is found dead after a forced amputation, tying her to a severed leg pulled from the Gowanus Canal 11 years earlier.
- Season 14 · Episode 5
Manhattan Vigil
The kidnapping of a real estate heir’s young son leads Benson back to a boy who vanished from the same neighborhood 13 years earlier.
- Season 14 · Episode 6
Friending Emily
When a 14-year-old tourist vanishes from a college party and turns up on a live darknet stream, the squad tracks her captor through the girls he took before her.
- Season 15 · Episode 1
Surrender Benson
Out on bail after a mistrial, serial rapist William Lewis abducts Benson from her apartment and holds her on Long Island while the squad hunts for them.
- Season 15 · Episode 2
Imprisoned Lives
A boy abandoned in Times Square leads the squad to a Brooklyn basement where a man held three women for years, as Benson tests whether she is ready to return.
- Season 15 · Episode 10
Psycho/Therapist
Benson must testify against William Lewis, who acts as his own lawyer and turns her account of her abduction, and her beating of him, against her.
- Season 15 · Episode 20
Beast's Obsession
Serial rapist William Lewis escapes from custody, kidnaps a 12-year-old girl and holds her life over Benson until she admits she lied about beating him.
- Season 16 · Episode 14
Intimidation Game
Misogynist gamers who have harassed a female developer online escalate to assault, swatting and kidnapping as she refuses to cancel her game’s launch.
- Season 16 · Episode 20
Daydream Believer
SVU and Chicago’s Intelligence Unit hunt a doctor suspected of a decade of rape-murders after he abducts a young woman from Voight’s office and drives her to New York.
- 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 13
The Undiscovered Country
A father kidnaps his terminally ill baby to stop doctors from ending his life support, and Barba’s response lands him on trial for murder.
- Season 20 · Episode 11
Plastic
A young woman’s rape complaint against a celebrity plastic surgeon and his girlfriend leads SVU to a teenager who disappeared 14 years earlier and a body hidden in a wall.
- Season 20 · Episode 17
Missing
A six-year-old found in the trunk of a stolen car leads SVU to her kidnapper and to a boy who vanished from a Queens park in 2002.
- Season 22 · Episode 11
Our Words Will Not Be Heard
A white supremacist crew kidnaps the sister of an activist for missing Black women and auctions her fate online, while Benson weighs how to push the NYPD toward reform.
- Season 24 · Episode 4
The Steps We Cannot Take
A gunman shoots a restaurant owner and his wife and abducts their daughter, and the search uncovers two women held captive for years in a house upstate.
- Season 25 · Episode 1
Tunnel Blind
A 15-year-old girl vanishes from a store, Benson realizes she saw her in a van minutes later, and a sex doll made in the girl’s likeness leads the squad toward her abductor.
- Season 25 · Episode 5
Zone Rouge
A message on a train ticket revives the search for Maddie Flynn, and Benson teams with an FBI agent to follow her abductor along the railway.
- Season 25 · Episode 9
Children of Wolves
Four young men attack two teenage girls in a Manhattan park and take one of them, while Benson faces her son’s questions about his own violent beginnings.
- Season 25 · Episode 10
Combat Fatigue
After a juror’s outburst forces a mistrial, Carisi retries Maddie Flynn’s kidnapper, who fires his lawyer, makes bail and defends himself.
- Season 25 · Episode 12
Marauder
Benson quietly reopens the decades-old disappearance of Agent Sykes’s sister and connects it to other missing girls across the Northeast.
- Season 26 · Episode 20
Shock Collar
An eight-year-old is taken with her mother’s car during a food delivery, and the squad races to find her after she appears on a website that streams her torture for paying subscribers.
- Season 26 · Episode 21
Aperture
A witness sees a gunpoint assault through a telescope, and the squad finds the victims are wealthy stepsiblings who were forced into sex on camera and are hiding what happened.
- Season 27 · Episode 8
Showdown
A con man’s report that his girlfriend was raped and kidnapped sends SVU after the wrong suspect, and the mistakes follow the squad into court.
- Season 27 · Episode 14
Frequency
A baby monitor intercepts a live feed of a caged, non-speaking boy, and the squad races to find him while Griffin tries to reach him.
- Season 27 · Episode 21
Monster
A suppressed search frees a man caught with a kidnapped boy in his trunk, and SVU must rebuild the case before he takes another child.
More themes: Crimes
- Blackmail & Extortion
- Child Abuse & Neglect
- Child Murders
- Child Sexual Abuse
- Con Artists
- Cults
- Date Rape & Consent
- Domestic Violence
- Gang Rape
- Grooming
- Gun Violence
- Hate Crimes
- Hostage Standoffs
- Human Trafficking
- Incest
- Male Victims
- Murder for Hire
- Online Predators
- Prison Rape
- Prostitution & Sex Work
- Serial Killers
- Serial Rapists
- Stalking & Voyeurism
- Statutory Rape
- Vigilantes & Revenge
- War Crimes