Reinery29.com
6.15.15 | Laura Le Vine
In the past month, two popular shows offered brutal depictions of rape, with beloved main characters becoming victims of assault. One show, Game of Thrones, has been widely chastised for how it handled Sansa Stark’s wedding-night rape. The other, Outlander, received mostly positive feedback for its depiction of Jamie Fraser’s rape and torture.
Sansa and Jamie may be fictional characters, but their stories have started an important conversation, drawing attention to a vital missing piece in the long history of how sexual violence has been portrayed on television: What happens to survivors afterward, and how can depicting these traumatic experiences on TV educate and inform viewers about sexual assault?
In the aftermath of Sansa's and Jamie’s rapes, Amy Zimmerman wrote an article in The Daily Beast about TV’s current golden age of “rape glut,” which can be identified on shows like Game of Thrones and Law & Order: SVU. She defined it as “a crime procedural template that doesn’t allow for the psychological complexities of trauma and recovery, and the constant, merciless, explicit exploitation of the theme of women’s disposability in a patriarchal world.”
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