Australian Teen's Death Renews Calls to Ban Sexual Strangulation in Porn

An Australian teenage girl’s death, suspected to be preceded by consensual “choking” during sex, has renewed calls to ban showing the act in porn.

This latest tragedy, reportedly believed to involve sexual strangulation, comes just months after the UK banned porn showing the practice. But despite all the noise, most people still aren’t aware of just how dangerous the trend is.

Sexual strangulation or “choking” during sex, as it’s referred to colloquially, has become wildly popular—especially among adults aged 18 to 35, despite the risk of severe injury, brain damage, and even death. Some researchers argue that porn is to blame for that normalization, but members of the adult industry say that banning depictions of choking won’t stop this kind of content from flourishing or serve as the kind of sex education and media literacy the public sorely needs.

“With the misinformation that’s out there, especially online, many people do think that maybe at lighter pressures they might be ‘safe,’ and that’s not the case,” says Debby Herbenick, a professor at the Indiana University School of Public Health and one of the leading researchers on sexual strangulation. Herbenick cautions that applying sustained pressure to the front and sides of the throat—via your hands, an object, or otherwise—can lead to blood clots and stroke, tears in the carotid arteries, vision impairment, and cumulative brain injuries.

“It’s these things that we wouldn’t even notice,” she says. “Those tiny, incremental changes in your vision, or your brain, or so on.”

Or, in the most extreme cases, death. Pressing on the front of the throat can lead to airway collapse, Herbenick says. Two weeks ago, a 16-year-old girl in Sydney passed out after authorities believe she was strangled by her equally young partner during sex. She died after being taken to a local hospital in critical condition, and the investigation is ongoing. It’s unknown what her exact injuries were.

The Australian Social Services Minister has since said the government is “very seriously” looking at efforts to ban pornographic depictions of choking in sex, in line with the country’s recently passed age-verification laws that ban social media for children under the age of 16. But critics of these social media bans say they don’t actually work and make it harder for teens to access news and information they need, including sex education around the dangers of choking and strangulation.

The data regarding rates of young people choking and being choked during sex can appear staggering. In Herbenick’s 2021 survey of nearly 5,000 college students in the US, 58 percent of women had been choked during sex and a quarter had been first choked by age 17. Researchers in Australia similarly found rates of around half of people aged 18 to 35 engaging in the practice. Herbenick found that women are usually the ones being choked by men during heterosexual sex and that sexual and gender minorities are also more likely to be choked during sex.

“There are other people who say ‘I asked them to choke me or I said it was OK, but then they really pushed past my limits or it was a lot harder than I expected, or I asked them to stop and they didn’t,’” Herbenick says. She also says that while some young men enjoy the act, others “tell us that they don’t want to be choking their partners, but they think they’re supposed to, or they get asked all the time.”

Most of the self-reported occurrences of sexual strangulation among US college students Herbenick surveyed were described as consensual, but when choking is nonconsensual, it can be even more dangerous. In fact, strangulation is one of the strongest predictors for murder in an abusive relationship.

It’s important to distinguish between the different types of intimate partner strangulation: as a form of abuse, nonconsensual introduction of strangulation into what may have started as a consensual hookup, fully consensual choking, and fictional depictions of choking, like what is usually happening in legal pornography and television. But with the exception of staged or implied choking (like placing a hand over a partner’s neck without actually applying pressure), all of these kinds of strangulation carry major and even deadly health risks for the person on the receiving end.

Clare McGlynn, a law professor at Durham University whose work has contributed to pornography regulation in the UK for 20 years, says the amount of porn involving strangulation has risen over the past few decades and corresponds with an increase in children viewing strangulation content.

“If you ask young people, ‘Where do you get your ideas for sex or sexual activity?’ they say ‘porn.’ And you think, ‘Well, yeah, of course you do,’” McGlynn says. “I think its ubiquity in porn does mean that’s why we see large numbers of young people engaging in this practice consensually, because they think through scripts they’ve seen in mainstream porn that it’s normal, it’s expected.”

The UK’s recent ban on porn showing strangulation or suffocation falls under the country’s Online Safety Act, which requires social media platforms, search engines, and other web services to proactively remove illegal material and employ controversial age-verification measures. According to McGlynn, the strangulation ban was adopted in April but hasn’t been implemented or enforced yet, meaning the government has yet to take action against any companies or individuals.

“The platforms aren’t going to act in and of themselves,” she says. “They’re only going to act if they think the regulator is going to take action against them.”

McGlynn believes that within a few years of the ban on strangulation in porn actually being enforced, a new generation of young people may grow up without seeing choking as a standard part of sex. It’s an optimistic view—one that isn’t shared by everyone.

Cherie DeVille, a well-known pornographic actress, points to the fallout from age-verification laws—requiring proof of age to access adult content—as an example of the futility of banning porn. Consumers can simply use VPNs to get around local laws and turn to the unregulated world of sexually explicit content, often hosted by foreign platforms that don’t comply with any of the laws that major companies are forced to obey.

DeVille, who was a physical therapist prior to entering the adult film industry, describes how talent liaisons assist in the negotiation of what is allowed in specific scenes before filming, including choking, which she says never involves putting actual pressure on the trachea.

Pornhub echoed its consent policy for performers in an email statement to WIRED, writing, “We can be confident that the acts that appear in our content are completely consensual, unlike other platforms that don't have the same consent requirements.” Meanwhile, adult creators on OnlyFans are wary of posting anything involving choking after the service was forced to clamp down on most hardcore content in 2021 to avoid banks freezing payments. (OnlyFans didn’t respond to a request for comment about whether choking and sexual strangulation are technically banned on the platform.)

While Herbenick says that young men are more likely to learn about sexual strangulation from porn, young women are more likely to learn about it from memes, mainstream entertainment, or even erotic fanfiction about One Direction. HBO director Sam Levinson featured it in early episodes of Euphoria and The Idol. It was the opener to a chart-topping Jack Harlow song, where he crooned about choking a woman but not being a “killer.”

“Porn is an appealing boogeyman to say we can stop this by regulating this very specific type of speech, despite the fact that this is ubiquitous throughout culture,” says Mike Stabile, the director of public policy for the Free Speech Coalition, which is the nonprofit trade association for the US adult industry. “The solution is education. The solution is to talk about consent rather than try and find a singular cause that, if you were able to censor it, will solve the problem.”

Herbenick agrees about education. She says one of the biggest cultural changes we need to make is for parents to talk to their kids and teenagers about the dangers of strangulation and the type of messaging they’re consuming about choking during sex—whether it’s in porn or the Billboard Hot 100.