The UK government announced at the start of November plans to make pornography depicting strangulation or suffocation illegal. Kirsty Blake Knox looks at how it moved from porn to real lives and the dangers of strangulation
Young people with limited sexual experience have a distorted view of what sex should look like after watching extreme content online.
On Monday 3 November, the UK government announced plans to make it illegal for pornography to depict strangulation or suffocation, which can be referred to as choking or breath play. Possessing or publishing porn featuring choking will become a criminal offence.
Violence and strangulation in porn has become more widespread in recent years and some say this has an impact in the real world where non-consensual strangulation has been normalised and become part of people’s sex lives.
This mainly appears to impact those under the age of 40. A UK government-funded charity called the Institute For Addressing Strangulation (Ifas) suggests strangling is most common with the 16-34 age group.
Last year, Melbourne University Law School and The University of Queensland conducted a study of 4,702 young people aged from 18 to 35 and found that 57pc had been strangled during sex at least once.
In its most extreme cases, strangulation can result in death. It can cause a litany of other long-term problems. Pressure on the neck cuts off the blood supply to the brain and this can cause brain damage, loss of consciousness, incontinence, increase the likelihood of stroke and result in thyroid injuries.
It can lead to psychological problems such as post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and contribute to depression.
In 2022, the then Minister for Justice Helen McEntee made non-fatal strangulation a standalone offence.
Roscommon-based GP Dr Madeleine Ní Dhálaigh, who earlier this year took part in a discussion titled ‘The malign force of pornography in fuelling sexual and gender-based violence’, says it is important people become aware of the risk.
“The message we wanted to put across is that there is no safe way to choke someone. There’s no safe way to put your hands or a device around a person’s neck in a safe manner. It doesn’t exist,” she says.
Often in porn, this is depicted as an edgy and pleasurable act, but there is a huge risk here. Ní Dhálaigh says “you can’t withdraw consent if somebody’s choking you… You can’t say no”.
“Sometimes your arms will go limp, so you can’t even raise your hand to say no… this isn’t sensationalist stuff and it’s not about being sex negative. It’s about being positive about safety and about letting young women know that they don’t have to consent to this.”
UK-based COSRT-accredited sex and relationship therapist Laura Stannard believes there are many reasons why violent sex has become normalised.
“First, pornography has become the primary source of sex education for many young people. Without context, communication or consent-based education, viewers can easily mistake performance for reality,” she says.
“They see these acts represented as erotic or standard, but never see the negotiation, boundaries, or aftercare that real-life BDSM or kink communities would emphasise. Second, porn algorithms reward intensity – the more extreme the act, the more clicks and visibility it gets. That distorts what’s ‘typical’ and shifts our cultural norms around sex. Third, there’s a lack of open, honest conversations about sexual risk.”
She says that while we teach children that violence in films is not real, “we rarely give them the same framework for understanding pornography”.
“Without those conversations, young people don’t learn that strangulation carries serious risks, including brain injury and death, even when done ‘lightly’.”
She says in this way “education hasn’t kept pace with exposure” to pornography.
Last year, Women’s Aid commissioned the Sexual Exploitation Research and Policy Institute of Ireland (Serp) to conduct a study ‘Facing Reality: Addressing the Role of Pornography in the Pandemic of Violence against Women and Girls’.
Director of Serp Ruth Breslin says the study showed the lasting impact pornography can have on sexual practices.
“We’ve seen strangulation [become] a normalised sexual practice, not as something unusual or niche or a kink… It’s now absolutely mainstream and a really popular practice… And in almost all cases [in mainstream porn], it’s the man strangling the woman or the girl, sometimes with one hand, sometimes two hands, sometimes with something around their neck,” she says.
Breslin says there is a huge amount of misinformation online.
“What is frightening about it is that when I went to explore this in terms of the information that young people are getting about this issue, the internet and social media in general is covered with tips, tricks, advice, Tik Tok videos, YouTube videos on how to, as they say, choke someone safely. Every medical professional I speak to worth their salt says that there is no way to do this safely.”
She says young people with limited sexual experience and access to this extreme content could potentially form a distorted view of what sex should look like.
“Young boys are telling us ‘we just went to pornography to learn about sex. We wanted to know what we’re supposed to do’.
“And girls are a bit different. Girls say we go to pornography to understand what boys expect of us,” she says.
“There is so much violence in pornography – it’s just rife with physical and sexual violence… Young people don’t want to come across as vanilla or boring; they see all these sexual practices in porn and assume this is what sex is.”
Breslin commends the UK government for bringing in the ban and would like similar legislation to come to Ireland.
She is not alone. The Irish Medical Organisation (Imo) has also called on the Government to ban “all pornography which depicts sexual violence, misogyny and degrading sexual practices”.
Family psychotherapist Dr Richard Hogan says children in primary school have been exposed to this explicit content and urges the Government to be more proactive in dealing with it.
“We need proper programmes in schools and digital literacy and all that stuff,” he says. “We need parents to have skills, to have the conversation that they need to have with a kid. But the Government has to step in here. It’s outrageous that an eight-year-old can be consuming hardcore, extreme material.”
But some are unsure of how effective a ban will be or how it would be successfully enforced.
Kink educator Aoife Murray says: “I think they will be able to enforce the ban on popular mainstream sites, but they will just end up pushing it underground. People who really want to view porn like that will find ways of seeking it out.”
Murray says she would “always advocate more for education than a ban. My reason for that is I believe when we send these things underground, more harm takes place”.
If someone has been properly educated and is aware of sexual risks, then when they see violence in porn, she believes, they will immediately ask questions and understand “that this is not the default”.
Stannard echoes the sentiment that education is essential.
“Young people need to understand the risks of strangulation and choking, feel able to have conversations about sex and to be empowered to say no to things that are dangerous,” she says.
“Honest, age-appropriate conversations about consent, safety and the realities of what they might see online are far more effective than censorship alone.”
However, most people seem to be in agreement that there needs to be greater awareness of the devastating and fatal danger of strangulation, and the long-term physical and psychological impact it can have.
And that no one should feel obligated to do it, or any other sexual act, simply because they or their partner have seen it in porn.
‘One minute we were kissing, the next, he had his hands round my throat’
Anonymous case study
“I had been flirting with a cute guy who is in his late 20s – a good bit younger than me, I’m almost 40 – but never thought it would be anything more than friends.
“We usually hang out in groups of mutual friends in Waterford, but one night he was back at mine after the pub alone and things got flirtier. We ended up kissing.
“The next time we met up, he stayed the night. He’s shy and sensitive and a bit of an oddball, but fun to be around and the chemistry was there.
“When we were being intimate, something he did really shocked me. Without speaking while we were kissing, he placed both hands around my neck and started to apply pressure.
“At first, I ignored it, but as it got more intense (and he’s a big guy), I moved his hands off my neck and said something like ‘eh, no…’ and then we just moved on. It was a weird moment and I was a bit in shock. After we had sex, I sat up and said to him something fairly casual like – ‘well, I wasn’t expecting you do try to strangle me without even asking!’. He said sorry and that was it. But afterwards, it just made me think more and more how crazy that is – to do that without even asking.
“I think it shows how prevalent it has become and a lot of men seem to assume women want it, but I don’t. It really worries me that he would enjoy doing that to me. Maybe I should have had more of a conversation about it, but I did say, ‘I really think that’s something you should check first’. I also feel it’s not my job to educate him.
“It was weird. I’m still not sure how to feel about it. We’ve texted a bit since and honestly, he’s lovely. Not aggressive, not an incel!
“So it does make me wonder how many perfectly sweet guys are watching porn with strangulation, so much so that they literally just think it’s the done thing now – as common as kissing.”
As told to Katy Harrington