The gendered nature of strangulation

Sexual strangulation is a practice that risks the life and the health of one partner – and, in heterosexual contexts, is overwhelmingly done to women by men.

Many young people report assuming that sexual strangulation will be pleasurable because it ‘looks that way’ in the pornography they’ve seen. But if this practice is genuinely about pleasure, why is it overwhelmingly women being strangled and men doing the strangling?

Violence against women is a global public health crisis. And strangulation is used by violent partners to instil fear, assert control and silence their victims, and sometimes to kill them. We can’t lose sight of that reality when we’re talking about this shift in cultural norms.