Last week, a 16-year-old girl was found unresponsive in a home in Sydney’s northern beaches. Paramedics treated her at the scene, and she was airlifted to hospital, where she died on Tuesday night.
Police are now investigating whether her death was the result of an act of sexual strangulation. While no arrests have been made, the prevalence of sexual strangulation among teenagers and young people appears to be increasing, with the federal social services minister, Tanya Plibersek, telling ABC Radio that she’s “extremely worried” about the rise of the dangerous practice.
After stating that she couldn’t comment on the northern beaches case specifically, she explained: “There is no safe way of choking someone. I’m pleading with parents and schools today to use every opportunity to have really direct conversations with young people. Kids are getting their sex education from pornography before they’ve had their first kiss.”
Now, experts are calling on the government to follow the UK’s lead and consider a ban on pornography depicting strangulation or suffocation.
Below, we revisit a story about the dangers of sexual strangulation from our September 2024 issue.
The Rise of Sexual Strangulation
In her early twenties, Sophie* was on a gap year in Europe, working and living in a hostel in Budapest and running its pub tours. It was a whirlwind of new friends, international travel on her days off and, of course, cute boys.
“There was a guy on one of the tours, and we were flirting and drinking, and later we went back to the hostel,” she says. “One of the perks of working there was that I knew which rooms were empty.”
One thing led to another, they started having sex and “towards the end, he put his hand around my neck”, she recalls. He didn’t ask first.
“It took me by surprise and I was a bit frightened. I just waited to see if anything else was going to happen. He was a bigger-set dude, very tall, very broad. I was young and naive and pretty drunk. He was a nice guy and I didn’t think he was trying to be violent but, looking back now, really anything could have happened.”
It’s a story that’s become all-too-familiar in girl group chats across the country, and not only among women in their twenties. Non-fatal sexual strangulation is becoming more and more common among younger and younger people.
From Kink to Vanilla
Non-fatal sexual strangulation – also known as erotic asphyxia, breath play or, more colloquially, choking – was once a fringe activity reserved for a small population of the BDSM community.
For some people, the element of risk, the power play and the lightheaded high from a lack of oxygen intensifies their pleasure. But that element of risk is so extreme that some studies suggest that even as recently as 20 years ago, fewer than five per cent of people had ever engaged in erotic asphyxiation. But times have changed, and drastically.
A 2023 study of 5000 American college students found that nearly two-thirds of women said a partner had choked them during sex, with one-third of those saying it happened to them in their most recent encounter. In the past four years, the number of women who said they experienced sexual strangulation for the first time between the ages of 12 and 17 increased by 40 per cent to one in four. It’s not a trend reserved for Americans.
Across the world, there are reports of sexual strangulation increasing in the United Kingdom, Iceland, Italy, New Zealand and Australia. In February 2024, researchers at the University of Melbourne Law School and the University of Queensland looked into the prevalence of sexual strangulation among undergraduate students in Australia. Lead researcher Dr Leah Sharman explains that this report’s small sample size (168 students) was to “test the waters” to see if Australia had the same trends in sexual strangulation as America.
“In the US, it seems very prevalent in people who are under 40,” she says. “We found it was very prevalent here, too.” Fifty-six per cent of respondents reported ever being strangled during sex and 51 per cent ever strangling a partner. In July 2024, the same researchers published a larger study, this time looking into sexual strangulation among 18- to 35-year-olds.
The results were nearly identical. Of the nearly 5000 respondents, 57 per cent of people have been strangled during sex at least once, and 51 per cent had done the strangling.
Of those who reported being strangled, close to one-third of them were aged between 19 and 21 the first time it happened. “We found that strangulation was happening very frequently to women, although men also reported being strangled,” says Sharman.
More women than men reported being strangled, 61 and 43 per cent respectively, as well as 78 per cent of trans or gender diverse people. More men than women reported doing the strangling: 59 per cent and 40 per cent.
Alarmingly, the study also found that many people think sexual strangulation can be done safely.
Maree Crabbe is a sexual safety educator and the co-founder of the advocacy group It’s Time We Talked. For 15 years she’s been interviewing young people about their sexual behaviour. “Over time, different themes emerge, and in the past few years, a theme that’s emerged at an incredibly high rate is the normalisation of sexual strangulation,” she says.
As a result of those conversations, she launched the Breathless campaign, which is attached to Sharman’s study. “When we discovered [sexual strangulation] was a pattern, we decided we needed to develop a campaign to build awareness about the issue and the risks that are involved,” says Crabbe.
Chanel Contos, the founder of the Teach Us Consent campaign, has been sounding the alarm for years that strangulation during sex was trending and that people believed it was safe.
In 2022, the then-24-year-old wrote an article for The Guardian warning that choking has gone from kink to “not out of the ordinary” among her age group. “I got emails from all these people in the BDSM community saying they’re outraged that it’s become common practice for young people,” she says now.
The Silent Dangers of Sexual Choking
“When people are talking to friends or seeing [strangulation] in movies or porn, they [get the message that] it’s safe,” says Sharman. “They think, ‘Well, no-one I know has died,’ so it has this aura of safety. But, actually, the danger of strangulation is that a lot of the effects go unobserved.”
The laundry list of dangers encompasses everything from going “cloudy” or losing consciousness to permanent brain damage and accidental death. Sexual strangulation is the second-most common cause of stroke in women under 40 in the UK.
Repeated strangulation has been likened to concussions in football players: the damage accumulates, meaning there’s greater impact on the brain. It’s also important to note that brain injuries can occur even if someone never loses consciousness.
Anyone who experiences neck pressure that cuts off airflow is at risk of brain injury, memory loss, delayed stroke, blood clots, cardiac arrest and miscarriage, which can occur up to six months later.
Sharman and Crabbe aren’t trying to kink-shame but to raise awareness that there really is no safe way to strangle someone. “Even the medical experts we’ve spoken to say they couldn’t confidently [strangle] someone and be sure they weren’t going to do any damage,” says Crabbe.
How-to guides abound on BDSM websites, but even they regularly flag how dangerous the practice is, with some warning not to attempt sexual strangulation after drinking, on drugs or when you’re in a bad headspace.
The general message seems to be not one of condoning but one of “if you are going to do it, at least minimise the risks”. “Our message is not to police it or make it illegal but that, if you have information, you can make a more informed decision about whether this is something you want to consent to,” says Sharman.
The Question of Consent
“So many young people don’t even think that sexual strangulation requires consent anymore because they think it’s just part and parcel with sex,” says Contos.
In the Australian report, participants who were strangled more frequently also more frequently said they hadn’t given consent. For Crabbe, consent isn’t the only concern. “There’s a misapprehension that if it’s consensual then it’s safe,” she says.
“I think the notion that ‘If everyone’s consenting then it’s all good’ is misplaced. There’s a real question about whether it’s possible to give consent to being strangled if people don’t understand the highly unpredictable risks. Consenting is just one layer.”
Consent isn’t going to stop someone from potentially being injured or harmed, or even dying from sexual strangulation, she explains. Then there are the challenges around withdrawing consent.
About 40 per cent of Americans who reported being choked during sex said they found it hard to breathe or to speak – in essence, difficult, if not impossible, to get their partner to stop.
“I’ve spoken to women [who have] gone into a ‘freeze’ trauma response but can’t communicate that to their partner because they are fearful for their lives,” says Crabbe. “A number of women have described to me just waiting and wanting the experience to be over.”
The prevalence of choking is also scaring people off having sex at all. Amy Louise, a sexologist at the Australian Institute of Sexology and Sexual Medicine (aissm.com.au), has experience working with teenagers in both welfare and sex education settings.
“I’ve noticed in discussions with teenagers that they are scared to have sex for the first time because they aren’t sure they want to choke their partner or want to be choked,” says Amy Louise. “It seems they don’t know that it’s a choice and that consent is required.”
Vanilla Shaming
“A lot of the messaging [out there is saying] that if you’re not into [choking], there’s something wrong with you; you’re ‘vanilla’,” says Crabbe. “I’m really concerned about the amount of young people, particularly young women, who consent to this act not because they actually want to, but because they think there’s something wrong with them if they’re not into it.
“This idea of vanilla shaming, what does that mean for our understanding of vanilla now?” she asks. “Vanilla sex is sex without violence; it’s healthy and respectful, and now we’re talking about that like it’s a bad thing.”
Pressure to not be seen as “vanilla” in bed means some young males are reluctantly strangling their partners. “Young men have said, ‘This is not what I want to do, I don’t get anything from doing this, I’m worried about her,’” says Crabbe. Sharman says, “It’s important to get across that there are other ways you can spice up your sex life that don’t involve danger.”
Amy Louise agrees. “There are a lot of other styles of porn that provide alternative sexual scripts that people can mirror, such as sensual massage, mutual masturbation or using toys.”
How Did We Get Here?
Crabbe explains that in her interviews with young people, “porn routinely comes up as the most common source of information about sexual strangulation, but partners, peers, social media and pop culture all play a role. In a whole range of contexts, young people are getting the message that strangulation is a normal, safe sexual experience.”
Between curriculums lacking in sex education at school and uncomfortable family conversations at home, the knowledge gap is being filled by free mainstream porn. Teens are usually exposed to porn well before their first sexual experience.
In Australia, 48 per cent of young men have seen pornography by the time they turn 13, while 48 per cent of young women see porn by the time they’re 15. There are also significant levels of porn consumption among young men, says Crabbe.
“A study from earlier this year found that more than half of young men aged 15 to 20 watched pornography at least weekly, and one in six reported daily,” she explains.
“Among young women, it was about 40 per cent weekly and one per cent daily consumption.” “A lot of mainstream porn places male pleasure at the centre and objectifies the partner,” says Amy Louise. “My concern is that when one type of porn is easy to discover, it may appear to young people that this is the only sexual script they have.”
Porn tends to present heterosexual sex as something a man does to a woman, rather than with her. For her part, the woman is a performer rather than an enjoyer of pleasure. The videos on free porn sites are also often violent. A 2020 analysis of more than 4000 heterosexual porn scenes on Pornhub and Xvideos found that 45 and 35 per cent respectively contained aggression that was almost exclusively directed at women.
“There are high levels of gendered aggression and degradation [on porn sites],” says Crabbe. “It’s overwhelmingly women who are being choked, gagged, called abusive names.” More than 11,000 videos are tagged as “choking” on Pornhub.
Crabbe says mainstream pornography can influence mind-body pleasure associations. “Our brain is a really significant sexual organ,” she explains. “There’s a plasticity to our sexuality, and because people often masturbate to pornography, they are repeatedly associating the experience of pleasure with what they’re consuming. It has the potential to impact arousal patterns and what’s considered to be sexy.”
Of course, the porn blackout that hit Australia in March this year has gone some way to prevent young people from seeing damaging content, and so has the under-16 social media ban. But it might be too little too late for the young people who came of age with access to such content.
The Porn to Bedroom Pipeline
Even if young people can’t access pornographic content as easily as they previously could, they’re not free from its impact.
Once an activity is normalised in porn, it’s only a matter of time before it pops up in mainstream media, which both reflects and drives behaviour. For examples of choking, think of the Fifty Shades of Grey movies, just about everything Sam Levinson does (there are choking scenes in his two TV series: 2019’s Euphoria and 2023’s The Idol), and Jack Harlow’s Billboard hit “Lovin On Me”, with lyrics that imply strangulation is as “plain” as the missionary position: “I’m vanilla, baby, I’ll choke you, but I ain’t no killer, baby”. “[It] has also been made mainstream by meme culture and social media,” says Contos.
In the early 2020s, #chokemedaddy memes proliferated on the internet. Twitter users begged celebrities and high-profile people – including Barack Obama and Pope Francis – to “choke me, daddy”, while stills from SpongeBob SquarePants and Disney movies were taken out of context to look like the characters were into erotic asphyxiation.
Recently, Dr Debby Herbenick, a researcher on American sexual behaviour, deemed there were enough memes to warrant academic research. She titled her 2022 paper “#ChokeMeDaddy: A Content Analysis of Memes Related to Choking/Strangulation During Sex.”
Porn Literacy
Despite bans on free porn sites and social media, teens are experts at getting around online boundaries. We know they’ll come across the content at some point, and experts want them to be well-educated and prepared for that moment. They suggest having open and judgement-free conversations with young people about porn is the best way to dispel its myths.
Silence or fear-based approaches can do more harm than good. Founder of the Tell Your Daughters workshop, Natalie Stokell, runs a nine-session Porn Literacy course that was developed by Emily Rothman, a professor of community health sciences at Boston University. It takes a non-judgemental, science-based approach to teaching young adults about porn and its impacts.
The course is open to all genders, but so far Stokell has only had boys attend. “Parents can feel like they are in the dark about porn education, and it feels overwhelming for them to talk to their kids about it,” says Stokell.
“I tell parents, it’s so developmentally normal for your child to be curious about sex, it’s just unfortunate that what they’re coming across is so graphic and extreme. We need to tell teens the truth about porn, what it is and what it isn’t. The more they’re informed, the more mindful and discerning they can be in their approach to sex. It’s inevitable they’re going to come across it, so we need to give them the tools to deal with it.”
*name has been changed.
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