Director Jeremy Podeswa who directed "Unbowed, Unbent, Unbroken" in which Sansa Stark suffered marital rape at the hands of Ramsay says that the controversy of that scene led D&D to make some changes in regards to sexual violence against women in Season 6:
The show’s creators, Dan Weiss and David Benioff, “were responsive to the discussion and there were a couple of things that changed as a result. It is important that (the producers) not self-censor. The show depicts a brutal world where horrible things happen. They did not want to be too overly influenced by that (criticism) but they did absorb and take it in and it did influence them in a way.”
Podeswa also says that, “I welcomed the discussion about the depiction of violence on television and how it could be used as a narrative tool sometimes and the questionable nature of that. We were aware ahead of time that it was going to be disturbing but we did not expect there would be people in Congress talking about it.”
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It sucks that it took Sansa to get raped for people to be truly outraged. If more people had cared about other women getting abused before then maybe changes would have been made earlier. If people had actually cared about Cersei getting raped by Jaime instead of crying bitter tears that they couldn't like Jaime anymore then maybe changes would have started to get made in Season 5 instead of Season 6.