The impact of violent pornography on sex today

Note: This blog contains themes that are not suitable for a younger audience.

In March 2025, the BBC published an article entitled: “'He strangled me without asking' - experts say choking during sex now normal for many.”

The content which will follow below is not an easy read. But it is an important read. Because the world in which we inhabit today - and in particular, in which young people are growing up - is very different to the world of even twenty years ago.

Gone are the days when viewing pornography consisted of hiding a Playboy magazine under the bed; now the primary route to sexual kicks is through a phone screen. And not just any type of sex: heterosexual or homosexual, vanilla or violent, featuring just about whatever fetish or fantasy you could imagine (and plenty you couldn’t).

The BBC article told the story of Rachel (not her real name), aged 26. She had not previously had sex with the man before. The sex itself was consensual. But the act he went on to perform was not something they had discussed.

She said: “He was on top of me - we were kissing and having sex, then suddenly he put his forearm on my neck and pressed hard with his full weight. I just froze…He just did it like it was normal and it caught me by surprise, so I just went with it. I didn't lose consciousness, but this numbness came over me and I just waited for it to stop.”

Two weeks later, a similar situation happened again, with a different man who Rachel had met on a dating site. Again, they had sex consensually. They had not discussed choking first.

“The actual strangling is a blank in my memory. His hands were round my neck, and then I disassociated with it until it ended…You go from feeling safe to losing control of the situation. I didn't have sex for a year afterwards because of how it made me feel alienated from my body."

Strangulation during sex cuts off the blood supply to the brain. The level of oxygen in the body drops, and the level of carbon dioxide increases. It can cause loss of consciousness, strokes, seizures and speech disorders. It can lead to brain damage. And it can lead to death.

The final sentence from Rachel in the article was perhaps the most troubling of all: "It felt like it was - in their minds - just a normal part of sex."

In recent years, enquiries into the impact of pornography upon violent behaviour have begun to concentrate on an area called ‘sexual scripts’. This concept suggests that all social behaviour (including sexual behaviour) essentially follows a script, which dictates what is and isn’t acceptable.

Given the widespread nature of pornographic use, it stands to reason that the behaviours which are normalised in the virtual world, then start to become normalised in the actual world as well. A number of studies suggest that the more that people watch pornography, the more they will want to copy the actions and attitudes which they see there. This is particularly the case with violent pornography.

Pornography as an industry has rapidly evolved in the last couple of decades. Interests which might once have been seen as fringe have now entered the mainstream. The theme of the day is ‘choice’: someone can watch whatever they want, whenever they want it, like picking a meal off a menu. This has resulted in graphic depictions of violent themes. Baroness Bertin’s Pornography Review, ‘Creating a Safer World’ has sections on the following subjects: Violent and Misogynistic Pornography, Strangulation & ‘Choking’ Content, Content that depicts Coercion and Exploitation, ‘Age-play’, ‘Teen Pornography’, Racism & Fetishisation of Minority Groups, and Incest & Step-Incest Pornography.

Research from a 2021 report found that 1 in every 8 titles shown to first-time users on the homepage of the largest pornography sites contained descriptions of sexual violence, including words like ‘brutal’, ‘attack’, ‘kidnap’, ‘force’, ‘torture’, and ‘violate’. The most common category featured was physical aggression and sexual assault. The statistics do not even include verbal aggression or consensual BDSM material. Tragically, the most frequent form of sexual violence was sexual activity between family members.

Another study, analysing the content of videos rather than just their titles, found that visible aggression was present in 40% of videos in a random sample; this correlates with a study of PornHub, one of the largest porn sites, in which 45% of scenes contained at least one act of aggression. Women were the target in 97% of such scenes.

The Bertin Review writes about the danger of these behaviours becoming so normalised: “Scenes of aggressive and repressive sex, with female actors showing outward enjoyment of degrading positions (even asking for them), can reassure the viewer that it is totally acceptable to watch the abuse of women, while misleading video captions may be training men to misinterpret real life signals from women.”

The title of the Children’s Commissioner’s 2023 Report sums up the pornography industry bluntly: ‘A lot of it is actually just abuse.’

One of the most concerning aspects of the rise of violent pornography has been its ease of access, particularly for children and teenagers. The average age at which children first see pornography here in the UK is just 13. 27% have seen it by age 11. 10% have seen it when they were 10 years old or younger. A study a few years ago found that pornography was accessed 1.4 million times by British children every month.

Part of this is due to the rise of smartphones: one 16-year-old boy, quoted in the Children’s Commissioner’s Report, said: “I think when you’ve got a phone you’ve got access to it”. By 2022, 91% of 11-year-olds had a smartphone, and 96% of 12-year-olds. Another boy, 17, said: “I think as time goes on it is going to be younger because people seem to get devices at younger ages…I think the age is getting younger from when we were that age”.

Research from the Government’s review into Online Sexual Harassment found that most parents had no idea about the material which was so easily accessible for their children: “Parents are often unaware that this kind of content can be found so quickly and easily on the internet, and can be under the false impression that online pornography is similar in tone to a top shelf magazine.”

It is not just ‘regular’ pornography that young people are being exposed to. The Children’s Commissioner’s Report found that 79% of those who watch pornography as teenagers see violent pornography before age 18:

• 74% see pornography involving at least one degrading act.

• 73% see pornography involving physically aggressive sex.

• 66% see pornography depicting sexual coercion.

• 49% are exposed to all three of the above.

The prevalence of watching violent pornography rises amongst those who were exposed to pornography at an early age. 96% of young people who had been first exposed to pornography at 11 or under had seen a violent sex act portrayed in pornography before the age of 18 (compared to 72% who first viewed pornography at 12 or above).

Perhaps most disturbing was this: of young people who have watched online pornography, 36% actively sought out material containing violent material for sexual gratification (that figure rose to 49% among those who had had watched pornography before age 11).

In short, our teenagers have now been trained to actively desire and seek depraved and sadistic material for sexual fulfilment; if ever there were an indictment on us as a society for failing to put in place adequate protections, it is this.

The pop star Billie Eilish once spoke in an interview about the effect which watching pornography had upon her:

“As a woman, I think porn is a disgrace. I used to watch a lot of porn, to be honest. I started watching it when I was like 11. I think it really destroyed my brain and I feel incredibly devastated that I was exposed to so much porn…The first few times I, you know, had sex, I was not saying no to things that were not good. It was because I thought that’s what I was supposed to be attracted to...I’m so angry that porn is so loved, and I’m so angry at myself for thinking that it was OK.”

In the Children’s Commissioner’s Report, a number of the children and young people interviewed said that they, or others they knew, had turned to pornography to learn more about sex (particularly among those identifying as LGBT), a sorry commentary upon our sex and relationships education.

One boy, who had first seen pornography at age 12, said: “Sexual education is lacking in schools and thus young people turn to online to learn about how to express themselves sexually.” A 20-year-old-girl put it even more bluntly: “Porn is the starting point for young people when it comes to sex.” Several commented that they subsequently felt that pornography had warped their expectations.

Essentially, young people (and indeed, some adults too) are having their expectations of sex shaped by the violent behaviours they are witnessing on their phone screens. Dr Kate Howells, associate specialist in sexual health and member of the Institute of Psychosexual Medicine, explains: "People are watching it [pornography] from a very young age and, for a lot of young people, it is their first sexual experience and therefore they’re almost looking to porn to learn about sex and what to do to be good at sex…If young people are seeing that kind of messaging from pornography rather than loving or caring, respectful messages then they'll think that's what they need to do - whether they feel comfortable with it or not."

The following statistics make for depressing reading:

• 72% of young people agreed with the statement that ‘Viewing online pornography affects young people’s expectations around sex and relationships’. Just 4% disagreed.

• 47% of young people stated that girls ‘expect’ sex to involve violent behaviour such as slapping and choking

• 47% of people between the ages of 18 and 21 have experienced a violent sex act. They were 50% more likely to have experienced that if they were frequent users of pornograpy.

Professor Hannah Bows, from Durham University's Centre for Research into Violence and Abuse, said that it is pornography’s influence which has resulted in behaviours like strangulation becoming ‘standard behaviour’: "What we've seen in the last 10 to 15 years is that it's become a glamorised, fantasised and celebrated form of 'normal' sexual encounters". Another man, interviewed in the BBC article, said about strangulation, “It's hot. We watch it on porn and so you think, 'if they do it and it works, why not us?'” In June 2024, BBC News reported on one particularly disturbing story, of how boys as young as 14 had been asking their teacher how they could safely choke girls during sex.

A number of respondents to the Children’s Commissioner’s survey particularly flagged how pornography had shaped teenager’s views of women. One 18-year-old boy, who had first watched pornography at age 12, said: “Many heterosexual men grow up to have certain expectations of how to treat women when having sex, and in general. A lot of that is actually just abuse.”

Others - again, particularly teenage girls - wrote about how they felt pressure to perform particular forms of sex acts, which had been foregrounded in pornographic content.

One girl, who was 16 years old, had first watched pornography when she was just 10. She described its impact like this: “It makes boys think they can do everything they see in porn in real life. Some things like anal are everywhere in porn but most girls don’t want to do that. Boys just think it’s normal and expect us all to do it and it puts pressure on us”. Another girl put it bluntly: “We don’t want to be choked unless we consent, not everyone wants to have anal”.

The previous Conservative government launched a Pornography Review, led by the Tory Peer Baroness Bertin in 2023; the findings were published in February 2025. CARE had initially been instrumental in securing this review. The review makes more than 30 recommendations to the government, many of which stem from input from us and other charities working in this space.

CARE’s Senior Policy Officer Tim Cairns commented: “The internet is awash with illegal and harmful pornographic content. This has had catastrophic consequences for our society and particularly women and girls, for whom it has meant misogynistic abuse, harassment and sexual violence. The review of pornography led by Baroness Bertin recognises the scale of this problem and sets out a path to deal with pornographic content that is harming vulnerable groups.”

The Pornography Review’s recommendations include:

• Making online porn involving choking illegal

• Making porn including adults dressing as children illegal

• Making porn featuring degrading, violent and misogynistic themes illegal

• Banning so-called ‘nudification’ apps

• Making it an offence to take non-consensual intimate images, or create them via AI

• Establishing a body to audit online platforms and punish non-compliance

However, recommendations are not the same as actions. In November 2025, the Government announced that it would put forward amendments to the Crime and Policing Bill which would ban both the possession and publication of images featuring strangulation and suffocation, with a maximum penalty of five years in jail. Duties would also be placed on online platforms to prevent the spread of such images. The Ministry of Justice said that social media platforms and other tech platforms which did not take content down could face fines of up to 10% of their worldwide revenue, and their senior executives could be jailed for persistent breaches.

The Government Victims Minister, Alex Davies-Jones, said that the Government would “not stand by while women are violated online and victimised by violent pornography which is allowed to normalise harm…We are sending a strong message that dangerous and sexist behaviour will not be tolerated.”

However, the key question will surround the implementation of the law: campaigner Fiona Mackenzie, founder of the group ‘We Can't Consent To This’, citing the Criminal Justice and Immigration Act 2008, which criminalises the possession of extreme porn, said: "More than five years ago, young women told us that social media sold strangulation of women as normal, as an expression of passion. The porn sites make this normal for men - and none of those sites have ever felt the impact of the existing law. So a change in law or practice is needed. It's possible that this time the government might actually do something about this. However until we see otherwise, I don't believe that any new law will actually be enforced."

The problem with pornography, and particularly violent pornography, is that it cheapens the good gift of sex which God has given us. Sexual pleasure was designed to represent more than a quick release and the indulging of our most animalistic urges. Sex should not be about acting out fantasies, for sex does not exist in the world of fantasy, but the world of reality. At CARE, we long to see a society which recognises sex for what it is: about giving, rather than about taking. It should never be about power dynamics, and never shameful or degrading, in the way that violent pornography so often is.

As Christians, we believe in a better story about sex. When we focus less on our own (sometimes disordered) desires, and more on how we can give to our partner, we believe that sex can become deeper, more loving, and more fulfilling, a physical manifestation of the truth that “I am my beloved’s, and he is mine.” Within the Church of England’s marriage liturgy, couples repeat the following phrase: “With my body, I honour you”, a sign that whatever they do, say or think (particularly when it comes to sex), will be in service of the other person.

Our bodies are more than just chemicals. When we have sex with someone, we are knitted to them. It is a sacred thing: the ultimate union of two into one, and the ultimate representation of deep love, when one sinful, flawed human being gives all of themself to another, and says, “All that I am, I give to you; all that I have, I share with you”.

The American pastor Tim Keller once said this: “Sex is perhaps the most powerful God-created way to help you give your entire self to another human being. Sex is God’s appointed way for two people to reciprocally say to one another, “I belong completely, permanently, and exclusively to you.” You must not use sex to say anything less.”

Our world has degraded sex to mean little more than shadowy pleasures and cheap thrills, when it is to be based around the deepest of loves and the most enduring of commitments. We must not use sex to say anything less.