How can we possibly come to terms with reports a 16-year-old girl child may have died as a result of consensual sexual strangulation with her 16-year-old boyfriend? Police are still investigating this case. Meanwhile what do we do, as a society, to contend with children getting their sex education from pornography when this may be what they learn? When this is what they think sex is?
Often mistakenly referred to as choking, sexual strangulation in the mainstream is new. It has arrived into the bedrooms of young people via online porn which has become part of life, one of the many addictive services generously provided by tech companies making billions of dollars. Some companies do a good job of cleaning up the urgent issues of child sexual abuse material and trafficking, but still, violent porn proliferates.
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Research that has analysed thousands of randomly chosen videos from popular pornographic websites found that physical aggression like strangulation, slapping and hair-pulling was present in 35-45% of scenes, depending on the website.
It’s important to be wary of clutching our pearls about porn here – there is no evidence to suggest that watching ethical porn results in an upswing in violent behaviour, but research released last year by the Australian Institute of Criminology does indeed show that more frequent intentional viewing of violent pornography is associated with a “small but statistically significant” increase in violence against women by men after they watched violent porn.
Couple this with the knowledge that one in three Australian children have seen online porn and that the average age of initial consumption of porn is 13 – and we can all feel a desperate kind of sorrow for adolescents navigating this world. Girls thinking this is what boys want, boys thinking that this is what girls want. The confusion, the painful wanting to be wanted, that perennial need to be thought of as cool that comes with teenagehood, all of it is now shadowed by the normalisation of something that is clearly dangerous – as any medical expert will tell you, there is no safe way to lose oxygen to the brain.
Some other facts to make you weep: sexual strangulation is now thought to be the second most common cause for strokes in women under 40 in the UK. It can lead to seizures, brain damage, memory issues, depression, anxiety. Two years ago an Australian study found that more than half of 4,700 people aged between 18 and 35 had engaged in sexual strangulation. A majority of them, 61%, had seen it depicted in porn. Others had seen it in movies, talked about it with friends.
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One desperately sad anecdote comes from the UK children’s commissioner, Dame Rachel de Souza, whose office has researched the harms of online pornography on young people. “I will never forget,” she says, “the girl who told me about her first kiss with her boyfriend, aged 12, who strangled her. He had seen it in pornography and thought it normal.”
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Proponents of sexual strangulation say it feels euphoric, like a head rush, and that between two consenting adults who have discussed boundaries it’s fine. But when people die, you have to ask: is it worth the risk?
Everyone is very careful not to shame anyone about their sexual practices, trusted consenting adults and all that, but we can’t deny that many children are learning how to have sex by watching porn. And children’s brains are different and developing. They react differently to the dopamine hits that come from watching porn, the addictive nature of it. Adolescence is a vulnerable time when they are forming ideas of themselves and gender stereotypes and power dynamics, all the while dealing with an onslaught of hormones and peer pressure. We can’t definitively and solely lay the blame for the rise in sexual strangulation at the feet of online porn – it’s a complex ecosystem of influence – but when it comes to children, it’s a good place to start. It’s a burden that shouldn’t be shouldered by parents alone.
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I know from personal experience how hard it is to have the conversation about porn with young children. You look at your sweet prepubescent boy child and think he is definitely the only child on the planet not being exposed too early to things he definitely shouldn’t see. He is. They are. Not talking about it is no longer an option.
