A Latino woman brings her five-year old son into a hospital with a gunshot wound. Mention of police scares her so much that she leaves with her other son. The name she gave was false. SVU have to try to track down the woman, when she and her sons lives are in danger.

The case involves the beating of a seven-months-pregnant woman, whose unborn child has been torn from her body via a primitive cesarean section. Among the many witnesses questioned is the woman's husband, a psychiatrist with several devastating secrets and knows more about his wife's beating than he's willing to admit.

When a young wife is found dead after what appears to have been an auto-erotic encounter, Detectives Benson and Stabler find out that the deceased and a group of her girlfriends had recently been accused of raping a male stripper (Pete Starrett). A.D.A. Cabot prosecutes the sexual assault. The rape leads the Detectives to believe that the woman's death may have been a murder.

When a girl in foster care is found dead, the squad's investigation leads close to home.

The detectives search for a rapist targeting Asian women. The case becomes particularly significant for Benson when the rapist's defense is that he inherited the "violence gene" from his father, also a rapist.

The squad is called in to investigate when a detective discovers a man shot and sodomized in an alley behind a gay bar.

Detective Stabler is reunited with an old partner, a gung-ho cop who long ago put a serial rapist/murderer in prison who's now on parole, just in time for another series of attacks on women. But when it becomes clear that the prime suspect is not only innocent but incapable of such crimes, his old partner regrets his previously celebrated arrest and teams up with Stabler to find the real killer.

When arriving party guests find a prominent doctor murdered and his wife raped, the investigation starts with his estranged son and a former patient, then moves to his mistress and her neighbor.

An HIV-positive man with a habit of carrying out sexual trysts with teenage girls on the roofs of buildings is caught by the detectives, who are determined to put him back prison. But when a series of rapes and murders throughout Harlem cannot be traced to the man, and begin to affect Fin personally, they begin to wonder if they've been wrong about their prime suspect.

The kidnapping of an infant at a grocery store leads to a scheme of snatching and selling babies for adoption, which brings back a case from 12 years ago that involved Captain Cragen and his partner, the late Max Greevey.