Young men turning to sexual practice that kills in 150 seconds

And women, like Alice Birbara, are the victims of this bedroom game that more often than not can go horribly wrong.

Alice Birbara, actress from ABC TV series In Our Blood has spoken up about a man who she met on a dating app who choked her violently during sex. Picture: Jonathan Ng

Like most modern women, Alice Birbara met a guy on a dating app. He was kind and sweet. He was in his late 20s. Definitely upper middle class.

The conversations flowed on their first date. He drank a little. She didn’t. They ate dumplings.

He was politically progressive. He even implied he was a feminist ally.

That was until he choked her until she nearly passed out.

“He strangled me with one hand and held my hands down with another,” she says. “My consent was gone because I couldn’t move.

“I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t speak. I felt like I was going to black out.”

What’s concerning is that the choking happened during what was consensual sex.

They had discussed his desire to choke her but she was concerned that she wouldn’t be able to speak to say stop.

Alice Birbara says that some young men need to stop “weaponised incompetence” in explaining away their harmful sexual acts. Picture: Jonathan Ng

She agreed that a tap on the shoulder was her sign that things were a bit much in the bedroom, to take a time out.

“How was I supposed to do that when he pinned my arms down,” she says.

Now here’s the thing – even if she had consented it would have been illegal.

The reason is that strangulation in sex can and does cause lasting physical effects, including death, whether you agree to it or not.

More and more young women are being strangled during otherwise consensual sexual encounters.

Maree Crabbe, a Victorian educator and writer, has been speaking to young people about how pornography impacts them as part of her research over the last 15 years.

For years, strangulation was never mentioned.

“But in recent years, young person after young person is telling us it’s become a normalised sexual practice,” she says.

Maree Crabbe from It's Time to Talk

A 2024 study by researchers from Melbourne University Law School and The University of Queensland surveyed 4702 young people aged from 18 to 35 found that 57 per cent had been strangled during sex at least once and 51 per cent had strangled a partner at least once.

More women (61 per cent) than men (43 per cent) reported being strangled and trans or gender-diverse (78 per cent) reporting being strangled.

Katrina Dee, director of South Australia’s Health and Recovery Trauma Safety Services (HARTSS), says that people present frequently to their Women and Children’s Health Network with strangulation injuries.

“Consenting to be strangled does not reduce the health consequences for the victim,” she says. “Any physical act without consent or where consent cannot be lawfully given may result in serious harm to a person and serious legal consequences for the perpetrator.”

Research shows when you strangle someone – even with their permission, the clock immediately starts ticking: 10 seconds to being rendered unconscious, 17 seconds to having a fit from lack of oxygen, 30 seconds to loss of bowel control.

Research shows when you strangle someone – even with their permission, the clock immediately starts ticking. Picture: istock

“What I am hearing about is women feeling very frightened,” Crabbe says.

“Women we speak to, speak about experiences of fear, concerns for their lives at the time. Feeling like they are going to die. Holding their breath or counting or disassociating. Impacts on their voices, losing their voice for some time afterwards, about bruising to their necks.”

She says research from neuroscientists in the US has shown: “The normalisation of this practice potentially causing permanent damage to the brain of a whole cohort of perhaps up to half the population.”

After 150 seconds of strangulation, it can cause death. In May last year, in Bradford, a West Yorkshire town in the UK, 31 year-old Luke Cannon and his partner Georgia Brooke took the illegal drug GHB. The drug works as a central nervous depressant that can induce both euphoria and sedation.

The pair had a long-running “experimental” sexual relationship. With Brooke’s consent, he strangled her. She lost consciousness. Confirmed dead five minutes after arriving at hospital. Cannon took his own life the next day.

In 2023, Australian man Zachary Dowling had tried to muddy the waters after an apparent murder saying it was an accidental death caused by rough sex with his 63-year-old boyfriend in their Maitland boarding house.

Georgia May Brooke from the UK who died.

He said he had choked to death through strangulation where Dowling had removed the 63-year-old’s dentures and forced them down the victim’s throat. Dowling would, however, be convicted for murder.

And in 2022, 33-year-old mum of two Sophie Moss was killed by Sam Pybus, an occasional sexual partner, using strangulation.

It was heard in court that he’d drunk 24 bottles of beer before visiting her, waking up the next day to find her unresponsive in the bed.

He was sentenced to just over four years after pleading guilty to manslaughter in what a Court of Appeal judge called “a risky sexual practice”. He will be eligible for parole next year.

So why are so many young people, in
particular young men, getting the idea that strangulation is a good thing to do?

For her PhD, Dr Gemma McKibbin, a research fellow in the Social Work Department at the University of Melbourne, asked 14 young people, between the ages of 14 and 21, who had engaged in problematic sexual behaviour this question: What could have been different in their lives so that they did not develop harmful sexual behaviour?

“The kids identified sexual education they were getting as woefully inadequate for the types of images that are now ubiquitous to childhood,” McKibbin says.

Katrina Dee is the Director of Youth and Women's Safety and Wellbeing Division, Women's and Children's Hospital. She is pictured at Yarrow Place. Picture: DYLAN COKER

But the bottom line, she says, is that “porn was triggering their abusive behaviour”.

“The sexual scripts that appear in their porn are often violent and degrading,” she says, explaining that the ages of young people first accessing porn is getting younger and younger.

The joint UniMelb/UQ research shows that people they interviewed said they found out about sexual strangulation through various sources, most commonly pornography (61 per cent), but also through movies (40 per cent), friends (32 per cent), social media (31 per cent) and discussions with current or potential partners (29 per cent).

Crabbe who has led the launch of the Breathless campaign to highlight that strangulation is never safe and often occurs with little to no communication let alone consent has said that porn has become increasingly violent and geared towards degradation of women in recent years. She says we need to consider this with another new trend – porn viewers are getting younger.

Alice Birbara. Picture: Jonathan Ng

“Half of boys have now watched porn by the age of 13. They don’t go looking for these types of films, they just appear eventually in their feed,” she says.

“One in six boys aged 15-20 watch porn daily.

“Incest, childlike themes are coming more and more to the fore.” And more and more porn is featuring spitting, swearing and strangulation.

“Porn is shaping sexual tastes,” she says – not just appealing to them.

While she says that there is some belief among the population that “erotic asphyxiation” increases the level of orgasm through loss of oxygen, she does not believe men are doing this to women because they believe it will enhance their pleasure.

She adds: “Why is it so gendered, why are women being strangled if it is about pleasure if the focus is on male pleasure.

“The pleasure is from the male side and is from their sense of dominance or control in doing the strangulation.”

Sex educator Daniel Principe believes porn teaching men not just bad but plain harmful behaviours. Image: Supplied.

Daniel Principe is a NSW-based youth advocate and consent educator who has spoken to over 35,000 Australian schoolboys.

“I’ve asked older boys about strangulation and I think it was just seen as something you had to do, for men to be dominant in sex,” he says. He, too, links it to porn.

“Boys are exposed to porn three years before their first sexual experience. Young people themselves are telling us it’s violent, sexist and racist.”

He says he first started watching porn when he was 11 and it’s been a long journey from “misconception and feeling uneasy about what he saw done to women to what he believes today”.

“I think I really did start to wonder about the impact it was having on that person,” he says.

Principe says even then he always had a sense of discomfort.

“I think I really did start to wonder about the impact it was having on that person.”

These suspicions, he says, were later confirmed by talking with gay friends but “mostly hearing from women”.

“Women were telling me they felt like a blow-up doll, that they felt like the guy was just acting out a porn fantasy,” he says. “A body that was being used – and the guys themselves were not even present in their own body.

“In porn, no matter what guys do to a woman, in porn they are up for it. There was no checking in about what feels good and what the woman finds pleasurable.

“Young people are just acting out what they are seeing.”

Alice Birbara says that "weaponised incompetence" is being used by men to get away with harmful sexual behaviours.

Crabbe also says that we need to urgently rethink the impact this is having on a maturing generation – and it’s not an issue, she says, of taste or morality.

She says neuroscientists in the US who have done blood sampling and MRIs on women who have never been strangled and women who have been strangled frequently and recently found significant differences in the brains of those two groups.

“What we need to understand is that in doing some of the memory or cognitive tasks, they could still do them but their brains had to work a lot harder – it might be that the impact is masked but it’s accumulative.”

Alice Birbara says: “Guys say they are uneducated. But to me it’s weaponised incompetence.”

Alice Birbara who appeared in the ABC show In Our Blood is now writing a screenplay for television about victim-survivors of sexual assault.

She says: “Guys say they are uneducated. But to me it’s weaponised incompetence.

“How could they not know they need consent?

“They have an entitlement and a selfishness. It’s just about their satisfaction and that’s it. He didn’t give a f--k.

“On the same token, these are not monsters, these are otherwise good young men who, for some reason, do not consider their partner’s needs and if they like doing something they just do it.”

Asked whether she thinks porn is leading guys to believe that women find strangulation pleasurable, she says: “I think porn has definitely influenced them into thinking strangulation is safe. It’s definitely a factor.

“But even if they’re not consuming that content, in my experience, there are a frightening amount of men for whom it never once enters their head whether or not a woman is finding something pleasurable or is even feeling distressed about something they are doing during sex.

“It never even crosses their mind.”

Originally published as Young men turning to sexual practice that kills in 150 seconds