"Experts say choking during sex now normal for many" - how did it come to this?

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

Yesterday, the BBC published a headline which will, I suspect, have shocked you if you read it: “'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 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.

It is, theoretically, a particular offence to perform it in England and Wales without the express consent of both parties. It is not, however, illegal to depict it online. 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."

It is distressing. It is disturbing. And it is dystopian.

Sexual practices do not just change out of nowhere. Instead, it is pornography which is rewiring the way young people are thinking about sex today. 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 piece said of strangulation, “It's hot. We watch it on porn and so you think, 'if they do it and it works, why not us?'”

The pop star Billie Eilish has spoken openly about the scarring effect which watching pornography has 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.”

The average age at which children first see pornography here in the UK is just 13. A study a few years ago found that pornography was accessed 1.4 million times by British children every month.

If you are a parent, the following statistics may make for distressing 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.

• 79% of young people have seen violent pornography before age 18.

• 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.

The title of the Children Commissioner’s report summed it up: it was entitled, ‘A lot of it is actually just abuse.’

It was fascinating that Baroness Bertin - who recently led the excellent Pornography Review (more on which below) - felt the need to defend herself from attacks from liberals, by saying, “I'm not saying that people shouldn't watch porn. I'm not saying porn shouldn't exist. I'm not a prude.”

But as Christians, we do want to say that people shouldn’t watch pornography, and that it shouldn’t exist. That’s not because we are prudish either. But it’s because it contradicts God’s good design, that sexual activity is to be confined within the ‘one-flesh’ union of lifelong marriage, between one man and one woman.

Interestingly, there is increasingly a push-back - particularly from feminist circles - who are recognising the way in which the sexual revolution (and the proliferation of pornography which came with it) has been severely damaging to women especially. Just read these words from the author Louise Perry, from her book The Case Against the Sexual Revolution: “Porn trains the mind to regard sex as a spectator sport, to be enjoyed alone and in front of a screen. It removes love and mutuality from sex, turning human beings - as Terry Crews has put it - into body parts.”

Pornography, in its very essence, sells everyone short.

It damages the so-called ‘performers’, many of whom are not there of their own volition: according to cases reported to the National Human Trafficking Hotline, pornography was the 3rd-most common form of sex trafficking, after escort services and illicit massage businesses.

It damages ‘consumers’: research shows neurological similarities between substance addiction and compulsive pornography consumption, and around 60,000 UK adults actively sought out help online for porn addiction in 2022.

And it damages marriages: a number of studies suggest a link between pornography and sexual performance of the consumer, including erectile dysfunction.

At its very heart, pornography is a contradiction of our fundamental identity as men and women who are “made in the image of God”, not animals in a zoo. Pope John Paul II once said: “the problem with pornography is not that it shows too much of the person, but that it shows far too little.” It turns real people into flickering images on a shadowy screen, who exist for nothing more than the purpose of a sexual release.

All pornography is, we believe, damaging.

But some pornography is even more damaging than others, as the rise of ‘choking’ demonstrates. The American writer Andrea Dworkin put it bluntly: “Any violation of a woman’s body can become sex for men: this is the essential truth of pornography.”

Within this context, it has been highly encouraging to us at CARE to see the long-awaited publication of the Pornography Review, commissioned by the previous government and led by the Conservative peer Baroness Bertin. This was a review which CARE was instrumental in helping to secure, and which aligns with many recommendations we have been making, including:

• Making illegal all online pornography which includes choking

• Making illegal pornography which includes adults dressing as children

• Making illegal degrading, violent and misogynistic themes

• Banning ‘nudification’ apps, in which new technologies develop a naked image of a fully-clothed figure

In total, there are 30 recommendations in all.

Baroness Bertin herself explained well the way in which our laws have not kept up with the technology that has developed online: “It strikes me as incredible that to buy a DVD, which sounds so sort of retro, the BBFC has to put a stamp on it, has to check that certain standards have been met. That there's no sense you are encouraging child sexual abuse. No harmful, degrading, humiliating practices which is not through consensual roleplay. You just have to go on the homepages of some of these mainstream sites and you will see of all that degrading content – particularly violent towards women – and it's all there for everyone to see."

But recommendations are just that…recommendations only.

The real test now - and this will be something we will continue to hold the Government’s feet to the fire on, going forward - will be implementing them. Please do keep us in your prayers as we work through what often feels like very dark subject matter in the months ahead.

But reforming the law is only one side of the coin. The other side is far harder: reforming hearts.

It’s important to recognise at this point that pornography use is not just a problem outside the church. Polling by Premier Christianity found that 30% of church leaders access porn on the Internet more than once a month, and 42% of Christian men say they have a 'porn addiction'. 75% of Christian men view pornography on a monthly or less regular basis. 90% of Christians believe the Church does not adequately support those who struggle with pornography use.

It is often said that in order to change behaviour, you do not need to know why not to do something, you need to have a positive vision in order to do something else. In short, we need - to borrow Glynn Harrison’s phrase - ‘A Better Story’: “We need to be captured by a better vision. The whole point about pornography is that it is less, it is a distortion of something, and we need to get a picture again of what more means. The problem with many accountability approaches to pornography is that we end up thinking that we need to do less of something, that we need to think less about sex...But we really need to think about sex better, in the sense of having a truly biblical understanding of what sex is.”

So often all people hear from us as Christians - particularly in the area of sex - is a big almighty ‘Don’t’. The one message we tell our world is ‘Don’t have sex before marriage’. True enough: that is vitally important! But questions like ‘What does sex mean?’; ‘What would sex done well look like?’; or even ‘What sexual practices are or are not okay’? On this, the Church has been far too silent.

And if we are silent, then that void will still be filled…but not by us. That is what has happened here amongst young people today; one young girl, in her testimony for a recent report from the Children Commissioner, said: “Porn is the starting point for young people when it comes to sex.”

Young people are growing up without any teaching from us on what sex actually is, or what it should look like. And as a result, they are giving themselves over to practices which are, in some cases, harmful and degrading.

We need to tell them a story about who we are as people; created, valued and loved. Violent, degrading and misogynistic practices are wrong, not just because they are harmful (although they clearly are), but because people are more valuable than some cheap thrill. As CS Lewis once wrote, “You come of the Lord Adam and the Lady Eve. And that is both honour enough to erect the head of the poorest beggar, and shame enough to bow the shoulders of the greatest emperor on earth.”

We need to tell them a story about what sex is: our bodies are more than just chemicals. When we have sex with someone, we are knitted to them. It is a sacred thing: the 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”.

And we need to tell them a story about what love actually means. Love is not the same as lust. Love is not the same as feeling a sexual thrill. Love does not take, and it does not pursue its own gain. Love, both in the context of sex and beyond it - means looking to give and to serve your partner. It never seeks to belittle, to debase, to degrade or to harm. It means to sacrifice yourself for someone else.

And that is because - at its deepest level - it is a glimpse of the greatest story of all, the story in which God Himself came into our world, set aside his own glory and humbled himself to death on a cross, for the sake of the bride which he loved.