After she was allegedly strangled during consensual sex with her boyfriend, a 16-year-old girl from Sydney’s northern beaches died in hospital this week. Her death is a tragedy in so many ways.
This could be understood simply as another example of a life cut short as part of the pandemic of women killed at the hands of an intimate partner. But the reality is more complicated.
It is impossible to fathom the devastation of the young woman’s family and friends. Her reportedly distraught boyfriend faces serious consequences, including potential criminal charges, although there have been none as yet. Regardless of the legal process that will unfold, this teenage boy and his own distressed family also face the lifelong prospect of trying to make sense of how this sexual encounter ended in the death of his childhood sweetheart.
Yet the greater culprits lie elsewhere. The boy apparently was enacting a sexual script that has been normalised by online pornography, social media influencers and their enablers within broader culture.
To the astonishment of many people over a certain age, sexual strangulation, or “choking” as it is commonly but inaccurately described, is now a normal part of sex for a generation of young people.
In Australia, 61 per cent of young women report being strangled during sex, according to a confidential survey of 4702 Australians aged 18 to 35. Sexual and gender minorities are also highly likely to be strangled. Men most often are the stranglers.
If anything positive is to come from this week’s catastrophe, then it must be that we put an end to the normalisation of sexual strangulation – in pornography, on social media, and in the sexual lives of a generation of young people.
[Ed: This is acquittal by media. Apparently men can now murder their partners during sex knowing there will no consequences. I imagine we only have his word for it that it was consensual.]
Source: A teenage girl dies from strangulation during sex. Porn and social media must be held to account
Yes, it’s unusual to see sympathy being mustered for a perpetrator. I’d like to see evidence of the victim’s “enthusiastic consent” – preferably before a court of law. The psychological consequences for the offender can be weighed up during sentencing. Surely at bare minimum they’d be staring down a manslaughter charge? Harsh sentencing might be the only way to achieve deterrence. And if others conspired to persuade him that strangulation is inherent to sexual satisfaction, then by all means, bring them along for sentencing as well. I shudder to think that I graduated from a sandstone university where pornography was touted as a de facto model of sex education.
2015 stangulation specifically made a crime/illegal in UK and incorporated into Domestic Abuse (sic) Act 2021 https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2021/17/contents (accessed 31 August 2026). Of course specific legislation ought not to be necessary: a person cannot consent to actual bodily harm or grievous bodily harm (per Brown) and strangulation (or choking) will surely result in actual bodily harm or grievous bodily harm – too often resulting in death. The WEL Draft Bill on Rape and Other Sexual Offences explicitly incorporated into ‘sexual assault level 1’ (penetration) and ‘sexual assault level 2’ (non-penetration) a provision that ‘consent’ irrelevant as both incorporated grievous bodily harm … Pity this aspect of the WEL Draft Bill was not followed through: the ‘excuse’ was that if parties are consensually (sic) engaging in sex whilst swinging from a chandelier which falls, the couple falling and injurying themselves (or the woman only) then that would mean cutting out consent would be ‘unfair’ – yes this was the argument made. (It was made specifically to me.)