Discuss @David Flin 's new article here
One thing that comes to mind, driven by the comment on how servants were actually treated versus the perception of how they were treated is that writing the more accurate case could come across as breaking a cliche of Downton-Abbey-like treatments.
Of course, it could be seen as "Social Justice Warrior"-like behaviour, or social commentary, as David says, but it appeals to me to have realism followed while standing out against the field. There's obviously a point at which the reader will mentally push back, with his or her worldview of the time too much in conflict with what is being described, but that's down to the skill of the author to deal with and a judgement call of just how much reality the readers are likely to be willing to take.
My gut is that you can make the realities of consequence free rape of maids something that explicitly happens in the universe but if its happening to the main character that needs to be a pretty fundamental point of the plot or its going to feel gratiuitous even if it isn't.
There's a big difference between what actually happened and what sticks in people's minds.
Things like the Vikings horned helmets or the plague doctors beak outfit stick like glue until it's very hard to overturn them and the audience comes to expect them.
It's also the case to be made that the reason there's a cavalier attitude to it is because the reader is more likely to be seeing things through the eyes of those Upstairs rather than the eyes of those Downstairs. The portrayals one sees and reads are almost invariably written based on the assumption of an Upstairs viewpoint - even Downstairs characters are "Downstairs characters as perceived by Upstairs people"; it's only when you start digging through memoirs (and they're hard to come by from the early period, simply because so few servants had the time or ability to write memoirs) that you start to get a very different picture of the same thing. I'm reasonably sure there's a story waiting to be told of the same event in a Household, written twice; once from an Upstairs viewpoint, once from a Downstairs viewpoint. I'm not a good enough writer to pen the story, however.