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

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.

Depictions of strangulation in mainstream pornography have increased significantly over the past 25 years, now featuring in 15 per cent of scenes.

With the massive increase in the amount and accessibility of such content, pornography has become a default sexuality educator for many young people and is the most important influence in the recent, rapid rise in sexual strangulation.

This normalisation is despite sexual strangulation being inherently dangerous. Potential consequences range from neck pain to loss of bladder and bowel control, headaches, memory loss, seizures, brain damage, stroke and, as seems to be the case with the young woman from the northern beaches, death. The risks and consequences are cumulative, so the more someone is strangled, the more likely they are to suffer harm.

According to Dr Jane Van Diemen, a forensic medical practitioner at Canberra hospital who regularly gives expert evidence about strangulation in court, “There’s no safe way to be strangled. It’s so unpredictable because the structures in the neck are so critical and there’s so much variability between people that we can’t predict the point at which damage occurs. So, there’s no safe way to strangle someone.”

Social media also plays an important role in popularising the practice. Social media influencers with no medical expertise tell young people that they know safe techniques for sexual strangulation.

And this is reinforced by other apparently more credible voices.