Game Of Thrones helped make Sophie Turner into an activist
For a stretch of time in 2015, pretty much all of the talk surrounding HBO’s Game Of Thrones was the show’s continued reliance on using rape scenes to shock or horrify the audience. Most of the discussion stemmed from one scene in particular, which involved Sophie Turner’s Sansa Stark being raped by Iwan Rheon’s Ramsay Bolton after being forced to marry him. At the time, Turner actually said she “kinda loved” the scene because it was “all so messed up,” and she knew it was an important turning point for her character’s eventual transition into a cool badass.
Interestingly, though, it seems like the decidedly negative response to that scene did open Turner’s eyes to the way fictional TV rape is treated in modern society. As reported by Uproxx, Turner has now joined a nonprofit organization called Women For Women International that is dedicated to “financial, educational, and interpersonal support” for women who are “survivors of war, poverty, and injustice.” She has also written an essay for the Thomson Reuters Foundation in which she explains that she got involved with the organization because there was such a “taboo” surrounding the depiction of rape in fiction: