‘Law & Order: SVU’ season 17 spoilers: First look at ‘Forty-One Witnesses’

What happens when someone is a victim of a terrible crime, and almost everyone who could have helped chooses to look the other way instead? It’s a situation that happens unfortunately quite a bit in real life, especially as we move on more and more into the social-media age. We find more and more ways to be insular within our own little worlds that at times we become more and more cold towards the plight of others. In a city of so many like New York, this can happen even more often than in other places.

This sort of situation will be the focus of the upcoming February 3 episode of “Law & Order: SVU” entitled “Forty-One Witnesses.” While the synopsis below does not reveal everything, it does at least give us a certain degree of information in terms of echoing everything we’ve said here:

“A woman is followed home and raped outside her building, where several neighbors witness the crime but fail to call for help.”

The chief cause for this episode will likely be along the lines of “if you see something, say something,” and it is a powerful message that does often get forgotten. Because no one spoke out, the challenge for the SVU now is probably going to start with trying to track down many of these potential witnesses, and then figuring out from there if any of them saw the rapist escape or knows enough about them to ensure that justice is attained. This case could be a struggle.

(Photo: NBC.)