There has been an uptick over the last decade surrounding the normalization of violence during sex. The United Kingdom (UK) has been at the forefront, tracking and noting that roughly 2 million women under 40 have experienced unwanted choking and/or strangulation during what began as consensual sex.
Lucy Snow, a researcher at the London Metropolitan University, teamed up with the organization We Can’t Consent to This on some groundbreaking research into the regularity and severity of violence during sex. Of those who suffered abuse from the same partner:
- 28% reported the person had taken sexual videos and/or images and threatened to share them;
- 41% said they were sexually assaulted or raped;
- 46% indicated the person had engaged in this activity before while 33% of this cohort said it had happened regularly;
- 64% reported their partner used violence to control them;
- 75% said their partner abused them in other ways outside of the bedroom.
In general, Snow found that strangulation is one of the most frequent forms of violence during sex. Of the women Snow interviewed:
- 6% experienced this from partners they were going to meet for BDSM (consensual) activities;
- 13% were strangled by someone they had met earlier that day;
- 39% knew the perpetrator well (a dating situation);
- 55% experienced strangulation by a long-term partner.
How Did We Arrive Here?
There are a host of hypotheses, and while it’s likely a bit of everything, the prevalence of extreme pornography is one of the more likely culprits. Jane Longhurst was killed by her neighbor in 2003, and while the man in question claimed Jane had consented to being choked during sex, a court found him guilty of murder. It was later found that the man was a regular consumer of strangulation pornography and had viewed necrophilia images immediately before and after killing Jane as well as for 5 years leading up to the incident.
The UK “Extreme Porn” law was later passed and included in the Criminal Justice and Immigration Act 2008 in Northern Ireland, Wales, and England, and subsequently in the Criminal Justice and Licensing Act 2010 in Scotland. The laws make it illegal to possess:
- Images that explicitly or realistically threaten a person’s life;
- Grossly offensive images;
- Pornographic images.
It can be difficult for some men to talk about this subject. Yet, a 2020 BBC survey by Savanta Comres of men under 40 revealed some very interesting findings. Just over one-third admitted to having choked women and roughly a quarter confessed to criminal assault without the consent of their partner. This could have come in the form of gagging, spitting, choking, or slapping. TikTok trends of “safe strangulation” or “breath play” have been posited as contributing to the uptick in these events and governments worldwide are genuinely concerned as to the cultural normalization of these behaviors.
