Often, SVU stories raise issues which may leave many international (and perhaps domestic?) viewers bemused by the vagaries of the American legal system. Not helped by the fact that there is no coherent system - over 150 years after the Civil War they still haven't worked out how to deal with the conflicting demands of Federal Law, States, Counties and Boroughs. Here is one of the most puzzling and upsetting - that a prosecutor can decide to charge a child as an adult, opening them to the punishments that they could incur were they actually an adult at the time of the crime. But they weren't! Here we have a fifteen-year-old child who accidentally causes the death of another - yet the system can pretend he is legally an adult? Say we have a five-year-old who is angry at her mother for some reason and pulls the cord of a steam-iron, bringing it down on her mother's head and killing her. How is she not equally as liable (if not more) as the character in this story? How can any ethical system of jurisprudence allow such arbitrary variation of the judicial process? It is a *system*, with all the flaws of systems. If a child is a child, then let them be a child; if an adult is an adult, then let them be an adult. For a prosecutor to be able to waltz in and say "Well, this child is actually an adult. (No, their actual age doesn't matter.) Yeah, let's go ahead and hang them!" still leaves me with my jaw well dropped.
Review of Transgender Bridge
