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Tune in Tonight

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Tune in Tonight

Posted by John Prendergast on March 31, 2009

I recently had the honor of working with the producer, writer, and cast of NBC’s top-rated show, Law and Order: Special Victims Unit. We worked together on an episode that will air tonight, Tuesday, March 31, at 10 pm on NBC. The back story involves forcibly conscripted child soldiers from Northern Uganda, and the legacies of war and trauma of abuse in the context of child soldierhood and sexual slavery. Neal Baer, the executive producer of the show, was determined to ensure that the issue of child soldiers would be portrayed sensitively and accurately. And Mariska Hargitay and Chris Meloni, the two lead actors on the show, spent considerable time learning about the issues facing child soldiers, particularly those press-ganged into servitude by the Lord’s Resistance Army, or LRA. The LRA has waged Africa’s longest running insurgency, a rebellion that has warped into a twisted Grimm’s Brothers tale of abducted children and terrorized villages.

Mariska Hargitay and I blogged about the episode on Huffington Post yesterday. And Enough has focused attention on the dynamics of the conflict and the steps necessary to ending the crisis. We’ll be working with Invisible Children and Resolve to support mass action events in April and lobby days in June, so stay tuned to our Take Action page for more details.

Here’s a clip from CNN about filming tonight’s episode at the U.N.: