Let's get this out of the way: sexual assault in any medium is both disturbing, triggering and terrible.

Two weeks ago, the fandom of HBO's Game of Thrones went ballistic when their precious Sansa Stark (played brilliantly by Sophie Turner) fell victim to a sexual assault after marrying the psychotic Ramsay Bolton on the show. Critics were outraged that a character that had been through so much torture in the past four seasons and now was finally managing herself as a player not a pawn in the plot, was brutalized even more.

Throughout the season, Sansa had been positioned as a strong woman who would no longer stand by while terrible things happened to her and her family, and critics saw this assault as a washing away of all character development that had been laid out for her in previous episodes.

Particularly, news outlets were outraged by the scene. Most notably, TheMarySue decided to halt their Game of Thrones coverage after the episode aired stating, "The show has creators. They make the choices. They chose to use rape as a plot device. Again." And although this criticism is valuable, for every character that is harmed on television, there are at least hundreds of real-life people who suffer similar fates. It seems small-scale to be furious about Sansa Stark's assault when women and men all over the world have suffered similar fates without nearly the same outspoken rage.

Every 107 seconds there is a new victim of sexual assault in the United States alone, adding up to around 293,000 new assault victims each year. And these results only include statistics of people who come forward with their assault. Many are too terrified of the backlash they will receive for telling the truth; many are afraid the police will not help them and their accused attacker will go free, seeing as 98% of them never spend a day in jail.

Most recently, Emma Sulkowicz, a Columbia senior, carried out a piece of performance art entitled "Carry that weight." Throughout her final year at college she carried the mattress she was assaulted on around the campus, to her classes and even walked along stage to receive her diploma with it. She vowed to carry the burden of this traumatic event until the school took actions to expel her alleged assaulter; she wanted to highlight the deep and lasting burden sexual assaults have on their victims. Strangely, reactions were mixed to theSulkowicz experiment. Some applauded her bravery while others tore her down for being exploitive.

Similarly, at my alma mater, Florida State University, a student came forward claiming that famed quarterback Jameis Winston had sexually assaulted her on December 7, 2012. The case spread like wildfire, many of the people who weighed in were split. Half believing the victim, the other half calling her a `slut' and accusing her of trying to throw the NCAA championship that year defaming Winston.

However, in the case of Sansa Stark people seem fairly unanimous in their outrage. Perhaps it is the fact that they've watched this character grow up on screen for four years, but perhaps the rage stems from how visceral the depiction of sexual assault in the media is. It's one thing to deny someone's pain, it's another to witness it with your own eyes.

The author of the Game of Thronesbook series, George R.R. Martin, has been candid with the differences between his books and the HBO show posting to his blog after the controversial episode: "There have been differences between the novels and the television show since the first episode of season one," he wrote. "And for just as long, I have been talking about the butterfly effect. Small changes lead to larger changes lead to huge changes." Martin has been candid about his depiction of a world in wartime, explaining that pillaging and sexual assault are the realities of war. The scenes in question depicted in the series are gruesome and terrible, as are the ones shown on television, but the outrage seems colossal in the face of real assaults that don't star Hollywood actresses on a film set.

The crux of the problem is that we allow media to be the outlet for our outrage. We allow television show plots to move along social issue discussions with little regard to the actual casualties of these topics. For example, when a character comes out and is bullied on television, hundreds of think-pieces are birthed about the state of current bullying in public schools. However, it is only after that media motivation do we remember that children are bullied every single day.

When we talk about Sansa, we're touching on misogyny in culture. We are discussing brutalization of women in film and how they're exploited for audiences. All of these are valid and important conversations to have, but if we could only channel that blind rage to focus on the real people who are sexually assaulted then we could see real change occurring.

If we were able to approach this scene in Game of Thrones this vehemently, then one should be able to argue that this sort of anger should be applied to real life events. If every moment on television is birthed in order to spark discussion and change, thenGame of Thronesshould be pushing the cases of countless real women and men into the public consciousness.

Perhaps we're not outraged for the reasons we think. Perhaps it's not just that sexual violence is being used as a form of entertainment in an overtly gross way; maybe it's more that we are aware that these things go unreported every day and the real life victims of these attacks often suffer in silence. Maybe we all subconsciously know this and we're all really infuriated that television moments like this remind us all of the dark reality we wish to ignore.