There are calls to expand school sex education to include discussions about sexual acts, like sexual choking.
Click play to hear from Dr Giselle Woodley.
In late August, a 16-year-old Sydney girl passed away following an alleged choking incident during consensual sex. New South Wales Police are currently investigating the matter.
The news has prompted a conversation about whether young people are sufficiently informed to properly consent to sexual choking, also known as “breath play”.
Research conducted by the University of Melbourne in 2024 found that 57 per cent of 18–35-year-olds had been “strangled” during sex and 51 per cent had “strangled” a partner.
Dr Giselle Woodley, a sexologist and research fellow at Edith Cowan University, told Youth Jam’s Isaac Mulcrone that giving informed consent is “really tricky” when people do not know the full risks.
“It’s really tricky to give informed consent if people don’t know of the full risks of such a behaviour,” she told Newsflash listeners.
Dr Woodley noted that while breath play carries risks, it can be approached with caution.
“There’s no 100 per cent safe way to engage in breath play or sexual choking. This is because of the delicacy of the neck and throat because it can take alarmingly little pressure or time spent engaging with choking or strangulation, sometimes mere seconds, not even a minute, to create really serious injuries,” she said.
“Some of the (safety) frameworks that couples, or people, can use are things like safe words. Safe words aren’t just spoken words, they can also be gestures, so non-verbal cues can be a safe word of sorts.”
When asked if pornography is fuelling the uptake of sexual choking, Dr Woodley said her research does not support that; instead, it indicates teenagers are being exposed to the practice through various forms of media. However, young people have expressed concern that porn fails to highlight consent negotiation and the safety measures that should be taken prior to engaging in the act.
Dr Woodley said that schools are not currently educating students about sexual choking. She suggested that resources need to move away from attempting to prohibit the act, as such messaging has proven ineffective.
“We know from our research that kids are getting messages about image-based abuse and sexting and sending nude images to each other, but the predominant message is basically ‘don’t’ and then we ask our participants ‘is it working? Has everyone stopped sexting?’ and the answer is ‘absolutely not, everyone is doing it everyday’.
“So we know these messages don’t work. So I guess my fear is is this going to be another yet abstinence based program. While there is some validity to that with this particular case, I think it does have to come with a caveat,” she said.
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