Porn industry ‘has blood on its hands’ as sexual choking rates soar

August 28, 2026 — 5:00am

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John* was an 18-year-old student who had just moved out of home and was eager to please the first time he was strangled during sex.

“I got a shock the first time I was choked and slapped in the face,” he said. “But then I thought, ‘maybe I’m the prude here’.

“A lot of my friends were doing it so we had this weird kind of Stockholm Syndrome effect where everyone is talking about it and saying ‘oh that’s so hot’.”

Asphyxiation was supposed to give you an extra high during sex, John said, although this never happened for him.

“We were conditioned to think it was part of being sexually liberated. And god forbid you be seen as vanilla, conservative or boring in bed.”

The issue of choking has come into focus after a 16-year-old girl died in the northern beaches area on Tuesday in a suspected case of strangulation during what is believed to be consensual sex. NSW Police are investigating.

More than half of Australians aged 18 to 35 say they have been strangled during sex at least once, with the figure highest among women and gender-diverse people.

But the health risks are serious, ranging from pain and headaches to brain injury, memory loss, stroke and death.

Experts and violence prevention advocates have been increasingly sounding the alarm in recent years in line with a rise in easily accessible, violent pornography.

Maree Crabbe, director of Australian violence prevention project It’s Time We Talked, says choking or strangulation wasn’t an issue for the first decade after she began interviewing young people about their experiences of pornography in 2009.

A teenage girl dies from strangulation during sex. Porn and social media must be........

© The Sydney Morning Herald