‘I thought this was normal’

the normalisation of violence against women in sex

Research briefing by We Can’t Consent To This, 2021

“I thought this was normal”

There is now widespread violent assault of women in sex:  we estimate 2 million[1] UK women  have experienced unwanted “choking” or strangulation in til then consensual sex, 3.5 million experiencing these and also slapping, spitting or gagging.  Hundreds of women have now told us of their experiences of unbidden violence from sexual partners as part of both abusive ongoing relationships and with new sexual partners.

Although violent assault of women as part of domestic abuse and in sexual assaults is a longstanding societal issue, it is only in recent years that violence in sex has become normalised to this degree, with most women who’ve shared their stories with us saying that they’ve experienced these assaults in the last 5 -10 years.  Women particularly report returning to the dating market in their 40s or 50s after the end of a long relationship, and finding that expectations of sex – and often serious violent assault - are totally unrecognisable from their experiences as young women, in previous decades.

New research on young women’s experiences of violence in sex

In new research by Lucy Snow at London Metropolitan University and in partnership with We Can’t Consent to This, Snow surveys UK women on their experiences of violence in sex.

The research[2] finds that being subjected to non-consensual violence in sex is very often in the context of a wider pattern of control and abuse. 80% of research respondents had experienced non-consensual violence in sex from a partner or ex-partner.

Of the women who detailed further abuse from the same man:

·         75% said the same man had been abusive in other ways (for example: controlling, possessive, emotionally abusive, physically abusive).

·         46% said he had done it before; 33% said it happened regularly.

·         41% said he had raped or sexually assaulted her in ways other than non-consensual violence in sex. 

·         64% said he used sex as a way to control her - for example, by shaming or guilt-tripping her into to doing particular things.

·         28% said he had taken sexual images or videos of her and threatened to share them

‘Consent’ must be viewed in this context, as one participant, who experienced many years of coerced violence in sex from her abusive ex-partner, put it:

‘It made me think how easy it would have been for me to have died and my ex to have said ‘she liked rough sex’ […] I realise now that he was making me say these things so that if ever he was in front of a prosecutor or whatever, that he could honestly, 100% sincerely say, I had asked for – I had even begged – him for it. I didn’t know what I was begging for.’[3]

Snow’s research also finds that strangulation is one of the most common forms of non-consensual violence used in sex, regardless of the perpetrator.  Of 82 women who participated in this research:

45 had experienced non-consensual strangulation, choking or pressure on her neck from a partner or ex-partner; 32 women had experienced it from someone they were dating; 11 experienced it from someone they had met that day; 5 experienced it from someone she had planned to meet for consensual BDSM activities.

Strangulation/choking/pressure to the neck was the most common form of abuse when the perpetrator was someone the woman was dating; the second most common form of abuse from partners or ex-partners; and the third most common when the woman had met the perpetrator that day.[4]

Hundreds of women have also shared their experiences with We Can’t Consent To This, unbidden violence from sexual partners:

From the age of 19 to 21 I was in an abusive relationship. At the time it was hard to identify it as abusive because I didn’t really understand what was going on. The abuse in the relationship was emotional but also physical, specifically strangling. During sex, which now I would identify as not completely consensual, my abuser would be quite aggressive, on occasion would strangle me, it felt completely demeaning. At the time I just thought this is what sex is, I didn’t have a good sexual experience to reflect on. I remember the concept of rough sex being glorified and normalised, so I never thought that my experiences were negative. It is only now that I am in a long-term caring relationship that I understand.

A woman now aged in her mid 20s

“It terrifies me that thanks to porn so many men think that violence against women is acceptable in the bedroom and I'm scared of meeting someone like that again in the future. Thankfully I'm in a long term relationship and don't have to worry about it happening to me, but I fear for the safety of my friends who go on one night stands.”

A woman now in her early 20s

“I don't know if this even counts really - I was 15 at the time and he was 18, so it wasn't really consensual to begin with, as I'd been coerced. We were dating. I was young and I wanted to keep him happy. He would force me into sexual acts that I was very uncomfortable with : he would slap, punch, choke, and anally penetrate me against my will during sex.

A woman now in her early 20s

“I met him when I was 18 and stayed with him for 4 years. The abuse started as psychological but turned physical and sexual around a 8 months into our relationship. He began grabbing my neck and face during arguments, and holding my wrists forcefully. He then began choking me during sex without my consent. On more than one occasion, I hadn’t even consented to having sex.”

A woman now in her 20s

More of their stories can be seen here.

How did we get here? Cultural normalisation

Although the ‘rough sex’ defence is occasionally called the ‘Fifty Shades’ defence and that book did much to popularise BDSM (and feminists and BDSM campaigners would argue, normalise abusive relationships)[5], the Fifty Shades trilogy is not the core influence on the men who commit violence in sex, nor on young women who receive it.

‘Mainstream’ Porn

It’s now easy to find content on the major porn sites of women being hung, strangled, suffocated, garrotted – and with “choking” content often featuring on the front page.  Thanks to existing law on extreme porn, this life-threatening violence in pornography could be criminal – but it is currently unlikely anyone will be prosecuted.

UK “Extreme Porn” law was introduced following campaigning by the family of Jane Longhurst, who was killed by a neighbour in 2003.  He claimed at trial she had consented to the ‘choking’ that killed her -  but he was convicted of her murder.  He had obsessively watched strangulation “porn” and viewed images of necrophilia over the previous 5 years as well as immediately before and after killing Jane.

This law was included in the 63 - 67 of the Criminal Justice and Immigration Act 2008 in England and Wales and in Northern Ireland, and in section 42 of the Criminal Justice and Licensing Act 2010 in Scotland.  In summary, these (consistent) laws make it a criminal offence to possess images where: 

·        the image is pornographic;  and

·        the image is grossly offensive, disgusting, or otherwise of an obscene character, and 

·        the image portrays in an explicit and realistic way...an act which threatens a person’s life.

When these laws were introduced, police and the Justice Ministry did not intend to conduct proactive investigations into possession of extreme porn.  And over a decade later, although this law has been used to prosecute images of bestiality, there have been negligible prosecutions for extreme porn featuring “violence, strangulation and rape, which is what was intended”. 

In the 2000s there was a sufficiently compelling case that men who viewed serious and life threatening violence in porn went on to commit serious and fatal violence to women.  We know that violent assault of women in sex is commonplace now, but is it porn that has driven this?

Men are extremely reluctant to talk about this – but in a 2020 survey by Savanta Comres for the BBC[6] of men under 40, more than a third said they'd choked women,  the same proportion said they'd gagged women, and just under a quarter of men admitting to criminal assault - choking, gagging, slapping or spitting on women - without prior discussion.

In this survey, most (57%) of men who'd violently assaulted women in sex said porn influenced them to do this.

Some men in criminal cases will talk about the influence of porn on their offending – and there is an alarming trend of young men, obsessed with 'rough sex' porn featuring strangulation and other violence from aged 11/12, and started to violently sexually assault when still a child:

·        17 year old boy sentenced for rapes of three women, including strangulation. Described as fixated on strangling women. July 2020, Edinburgh

·        19 year old boy sentenced for 15 offences including 4 rapes.  Some of the victims were children. March 2020

Four of the ten[7] recent killings of women claimed to be “rough sex” involved men who viewed porn before, during or after the killing, including the 14 year old man who killed Hannah Pearson, 16.He was described as “obsessed with strangulation” and strangulation porn, and “enjoying the sensation of strangling women during sex”, and that he would[8] do this without asking and see if women objected.  He was convicted of manslaughter.

Today Netflix, tomorrow Tiktok: Traditional and Social media

Many young women tell We Can’t Consent To This that they never see this type of violence critiqued as harmful, and for them platforms like Tumblr, online ‘fandoms’, Instagram normalised and romanticised violence from men.  These platforms welcome children aged 13 and up as users, but have been slow to act to protect them.

This year, Netflix’s 365DNI portrayed a romantic relationship between a kidnapper and victim – leading to multiple calls for its withdrawal from the streaming service, including from singer Duffy: who’d been kidnapped.  We Can’t Consent To This drew attention to the Tiktok trend that resulted from #365days, with men grabbing women by the throat, and women displaying apparent beating injuries, in homage to #365DNI.  Although Netflix has not acted, Tiktok did eventually to remove the trend.[9]

Instagram has acted in response to pressure[10], blocking some hashtags which were used to promote strangulation content although much remains including under tags like #chokeme, and some content which could be argued to reach the extreme porn threshold remains.

Instagram, Tiktok and other newer social platforms actively seek users from aged 13 and up, with 60% of Tiktok’s users aged 16-24.

One new trend on Tiktok under the popular tags #choke, #chokeme or #breathplay is for users to provide instruction on how to be ‘choked’.  These include:

·        A woman showing how to compress the carotid arteries ,

·        Another how to compress blood flow,

·        one celebrating “when he understands the whole point is to cut off your blood flow and not your oxygen”,

·        a man instructing how you can keep strangling til your partner is “going night night”

·        and how to “use one hand around the top of the throat”

‘Safe strangulation’ is not only the preserve of social media: traditional media too has for years promoted this to readers. In July MPs Laura Farris and Alex Davies Jones tweeted about Men’s Health’s latest piece[11] Why Some People Are Turned on by Choking During Sex—and How to Do It Safely, According to Experts - Let our experts teach you the proper technique. Both MPs received heavy online pushback. In response the Indy printed a piece setting out that “choking can and should be done safely”.[12]

Cosmopolitan did respond to our campaign’s feedback[13] to edit a piece telling readers liven up their relationship (amidst the global respiratory pandemic) with ‘breathplay’ – meaning strangulation, asphyxiation, suffocation – being a ‘great place to start’.

This year researcher Dr Helen Bichard of North Wales Brain Injury Service and The Walton Centre NHS Foundation Trust set out the appalling harms of strangulation[14].  She says of this new trend of online ‘advice’ for safe strangulation:

"I am extremely concerned by the cultural normalisation of strangulation. Erotic asphyxiation should be as much of an oxymoron as erotic brain damage, because brain damage is the potential result. Much of the online advice is misguided; some of it is fatally wrong. When you compress the carotid artery you cut off oxygenated blood flow to the brain, and the brain therefore cannot function properly. Consciousness can be lost in as little as four seconds – a sign that the brain is being compromised. Any pressure to the artery can lead to dissection, in which blood clots can form and cause stroke, sometimes delayed by weeks. The law MUST send a strong signal that this is simply unacceptable. "

As our previous research shows[15], the success of “rough sex” defences partially relied on serious violence like strangulation being able to be recast by perpetrators as non-harmful, and to claim he didn’t mean to do her harm, even when this was an inevitable, objectively obvious consequence. 

This cultural normalisation of violence via social and mainstream media, and the claims that there are safer ways to strangle, all help perpetrators in these claims.  A clear message must be sent to restate the seriousness of the harm of strangulation.

 [1] Estimated 2 million UK women under 40 have experienced unwanted strangulation/choking, as part of sex that began as consensual.  Source: WCCTT Analysis 2020, referencing BBC/Comres 2019 research on women’s experience of violence in sex

[2] Snow, L, 2020, LMU. pre-published research Survey on women’s experiences of non-consensual violence in sex

[3] Snow, L, 2020, LMU. pre-published research Survey on women’s experiences of non-consensual violence in sex

[4] Snow, L, 2020, LMU. pre-published research Survey on women’s experiences of non-consensual violence in sex

[5] Fifty Shades of Grey: 150m Shades of Grey: how the decade's runaway bestseller changed our sex lives, Guardian January 2020

[6] Savanta Comres/BBC March 2020

[7] We Can’t Consent To This, 2020

[8] https://www.nottinghampost.com/news/nottingham-news/dead-girl-16-strangled-man-163518

[9] TikTok finally U-turned on the sexually violent 365 Days trend. But by dragging its feet, it put young people at risk, The Independent, 13 September 2020

[10] WCCTT 2019: Instagram and the promotion of choking

[11] Why Some People Are Turned on by Choking During Sex—and How to Do It Safely, According to Experts. Men’s Health July 2020.

[12] Tory MP faces backlash for 'irresponsible' claim that BDSM act is 'degrading and misogynistic - Independent August 2020

[13] https://twitter.com/Wecantconsentto/status/1246369362350653442

[14] [14] Bichard, Helen, Christopher Byrne, Christopher W. N. Saville, and Rudi Coetzer. 2020. “The Neuropsychological Outcomes of Non-fatal Strangulation in Domestic and Sexual Violence: A Systematic Review.” PsyArXiv. May 15 2020. doi:10.31234/osf.io/c6zbv.

[15] We Can’t Consent To This – Consent Defences and the Criminal Justice System June 2020