Good morning. Yesterday, I was shocked to read that nearly half of sexually active under-18s have either been strangled or strangled someone during sex.
“Choking”, as it is known, has become normalised in young people’s sexual habits. A study by the Institute for Addressing Strangulation, part of the Faculty of Forensic and Legal Medicine of the Royal College of Physicians, published on Tuesday, found that 43% of under-18s had experienced the practice, despite much evidence of the dangers it can cause.
This extremely harmful practice is causing much distress among those on the receiving end, with 36% saying they felt scared during the experience and 21% suffering dangerous physical symptoms, including dizziness and even loss of consciousness.
To understand how strangulation became so rife and what may be behind the rise, for today’s newsletter I spoke to Anna Moore, who has written extensively on the topic for the Guardian, and Clare McGlynn, a professor of law at Durham University and author of the forthcoming Exposed: The Rise of Extreme Porn and How We Fight Back. First, this morning’s headlines.
Five big stories
Politics | Nigel Farage is facing fresh claims of racism and antisemitism while he was at school, with a Bafta-winning director among those making accusations against him. The Reform UK leader denies the allegations.
Technology | A key piece of the internet’s usually hidden infrastructure suffered a global outage on Tuesday. Cloudflare, whose services include defending millions of websites against malicious attacks, experienced an unidentified problem that meant internet users could not access some websites.
Health | The NHS has failed to cut waiting times as promised in its recovery plan despite billions of pounds in investment, the public accounts committee has warned.
Home Office | Shabana Mahmood is facing demands for compassion and clarity after it emerged that only a “few hundred” asylum seekers would initially be permitted to come to the UK under three new schemes for refugees.
Espionage | MI5 has issued an espionage alert to MPs and peers warning that two people linked to the Chinese intelligence service are actively seeking to recruit parliamentarians through LinkedIn.
In depth: ‘It seems it’s a likely encounter, not a shocking encounter’
We know there is no escaping the type and availability of pornography the internet has delivered. Yet it is still shocking to read almost half of sexually active teenagers are experiencing an extreme act like strangulation during sex.
It’s even more disturbing to read of the fear and distress of those who experience it – quite apart from the more dangerous physical effects they reported, including neck pain, dizziness and coughing. One in 50 of those surveyed reported losing consciousness, control of their bladders or, for one in 100, losing control of their bowels.
According to one stark piece of research, non-fatal strangulation (NFS) poses a greater risk than the torture known as waterboarding, as strangulation affects blood and air flow. Practised regularly, particularly among young people whose brains are still developing, it can cause long-term damage akin to repeated concussion in sport.
All this points to an urgent need to understand the prevalence and normalisation of sexual strangulation, and mitigate the danger.
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What is behind the rise?
Two alarming trends lie behind the rise of NFS or choking during sex, experts say.
First: the massive increase in young people’s exposure to online pornography. A 2023 study by the children’s commissioner showed the average age a child first saw pornography is 13 – an alarming statistic. But it’s important to note many access pornography far younger than that, before they are old enough to begin to understand what they are seeing.
Second: depictions of choking or NFS in pornography have become more common. Twenty years ago, research on pornography found virtually no depictions of it; this summer, the children’s commissioner revealed 58% of young people had seen strangulation in pornography. Like it or not, pornography has become today’s sex education.
“When I was a teenager, you’d see porn in magazines, but it is incomparable with the online stuff you get now,” Anna Moore says. “Now, you can click on to the next thing and the next thing. There is so much evidence about escalation. Young people are seeing illegal sexual activities before they’ve even kissed someone.” Choking was recently made a specific offence in England and Wales, even if done consensually, as part of domestic abuse legislation.
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When did choking become so common?
Anna, who first wrote about the issue in a widely circulated piece in 2019, and again in 2025 said she was “sad” but not surprised by this week’s findings.
“When I first wrote about it, it was shocking, but in the years since, it’s become far more acceptable. It seems it’s a likely encounter, not a shocking encounter.
“This is what young people do,” Anna tells me. But, she says, if you “keep banging on about it, you’re seen as a bit of a prude”.
She told me she found one council-funded sex education presentation for Welsh secondary schoolchildren appeared to include “safe” choking advice, such as: “It is never OK to start choking someone without asking them first”. The council has said it was part of a draft presentation that was never used after professional advice.
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The gender imbalance
Most studies on strangulation have found a gender divide, with men mostly doing the choking and women being strangled. Men are being strangled too, sometimes by women but overwhelmingly by other men, although studies on the harm caused by choking concentrate on the impact on women.
Tuesday’s study by the Institute for Addressing Strangulation appears to be an outlier, suggesting both men and women are almost equally on the receiving end. About 47% men and 52% women had been choked, but men were considerably more likely to have carried it out.
I was struck by a quote from Jane Meyrick, a chartered health psychologist who leads work on sexual health at the University of the West of England, in Anna’s piece from July. She told Anna: “I’ve had young people come to me in tears, young women saying, ‘I don’t want to be strangled’ and young men saying, ‘I don’t want to do it’ … but both watch porn where it’s handed to them in an uncritical way, and there’s an assumption that that’s what has to happen.”
Anna said that, after her 2019 report, she heard one case where a young woman went back to her boyfriend and said: “I don’t want to do this awkward thing” and her boyfriend said: “I don’t either, I thought you liked it.”
What are the harms of NFS, and how do we address them?
Despite advice easily found online, there is “no safe way” to do it. The neck, particularly in young women, is alarmingly fragile and blocking the jugular vein requires less pressure than opening a can of Coke.
“We’ve known for many year about the harms,” academic Clare McGlynn tells me. “If you get dizziness and unconsciousness, you know and that might stop you.”
Strangulation is now thought to be the second most common cause of stroke for women under 40. It can also lead to difficulties swallowing, incontinence, seizures, anxiety and miscarriage.
There are hidden harms too. Studies using MRI scans and blood tests, have shown long term damage caused by the practice.
“What these are showing is that frequent sexual strangulation, which is four times a month, is impairing cognitive processing” said McGlynn. “It’s like memory loss [or] repeated concussion in sports, cumulative over time. And we don’t know the long-term implications.”
McGlynn and others working in the field would like to see a large-scale national campaign warning of the “very real risks”, including strokes and brain damage.
Porn featuring strangulation or suffocation is due to be criminalised under Online Safety Act, and tech platforms must remove such material . The push to criminalise “choking” in pornography follows the recommendations of a review by Baroness Bertin, published in February. She concluded that choking is “the starkest example of where online violent pornography has changed ‘offline behaviour’.”
“The law is very clear,” says McGlynn. “With extreme online porn, the act will require companies to take the material down. It is going to be listed as a priority offence, which means they are supposed to prevent us encountering it and remove it swiftly.”
The law was a “watershed” moment, McGlynn says. Enforcement is the next step, but the omens are not good – pornography depicting rape is already illegal but, she says, still common on mainstream platforms.
What else we’ve been reading
You may have read about the eccentric views of tech billionaire Peter Thiel, but his Palantir co-founder Alex Karp has gone under the radar. Steve Rose corrects that. Toby Moses, newsletters team
What connects Tom Hardy, as Alfie in Peaky Blinders, Andrew Scott, the hot priest in Fleabag and Mike Ehrmantraut as underworld fixer in Breaking Bad? Michael Horgan celebrates 18 late but gamechanging characters who boosted later seasons of popular TV series. Karen
I never had a console when the Sega Master System was churning out 1980s’ classics like Golden Axe and OutRun, so could only glance jealously at friends and get glimpses of the impossible future of an arcade machine in their sitting room. Forty years on, Keith Stuart looks back on one of the early console success stories. Toby
This analysis by Tam Patachako looks at why the Congo basin, which is the second largest rainforest in the world, and one of it’s most vital carbon sinks, has been largely forgotten when it comes to climate policy and funding. Karen
If you thought the World Cup in Qatar was bad, Donald Trump says hold his Diet Coke. Marina Hyde looks forward to next year’s US jamboree. Toby
Sport
Cricket | England hope to strike a balance between work and play at the start of this Ashes week: as Australia trained at the ground to prepare for the first Test, the tourists were being, well, tourists.
Football | Women’s football coach Sarina Wiegman has defended promoting Hannah Hampton as England’s first-choice goalkeeper ahead of Mary Earps, saying she makes “decisions to win”, after Earps criticised the head coach’s move in her autobiography.
World Cup | Steve Clarke believes the Scotland support could “smell magic” before World Cup qualification was sealed in dramatic style with a 4-2 win against Denmark. Two stunning goals triggered euphoric scenes as the Scots secured a spot in the men’s World Cup for the first time since 1998.
The front pages
“Alarm as MI5 names China spy suspects targeting MPs” says the Guardian on the espionage alert, while the FT has “UK warns China against spying after MI5 highlights drive to influence MPs”. Looking across the Atlantic, the Times runs with “Trump: Prince knew nothing about murder”. The Telegraph splashes on “Britain not ready to defend invasion”, the Mirror says “Farage told me ‘Hitler was right’” and top story at the Sun is “Kremlin Brit’s ‘war crimes’”. The i paper leads off with “Reeves privately tells Labour MPs: I’ll hit wealthy with a mansion tax in Budget” and the Mail has “A few ill-advised remarks and a public school teacher who lost his job and life”.
Today in Focus
Is this Labour’s hostile environment?
When Shabana Mahmood gave a speech in parliament about her new immigration plans, for many it was shocking. But she received praise from unwelcome quarters. Tommy Robinson welcomed Labour’s shift to the right: “The Overton window has been obliterated,” he wrote. “Well done patriots.” Jessica Elgot explains why Mahmood’s announcement has caused such consternation.
Cartoon of the day | Ella Baron
The Upside
A bit of good news to remind you that the world’s not all bad
As Cop30 nears its close, the landlocked country of Bhutan – population 750,000 – is getting attention for an ambitious climate pledge. It is aiming to reduce emissions across every sector of the economy.
As Nina Lakhani writes from Belém: “[Bhutan is] boosting energy generation from hydro, solar, wind, distributed energy resource systems and piloting green hydrogen, as well as enhanced efficiency and regulations for transport, buildings and agriculture.” Bhutan’s prime minister, Tshering Tobgay, told the Guardian: “For us, gross national happiness is the goal, and GDP is just a tool which means economic growth cannot be detrimental to the happiness and wellbeing of our people.” Cutting emissions is one way to do that.
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