On September 10, 2026, WIRED reported that the death of a 16-year-old girl in Sydney — who authorities believe was strangled by a similarly young partner during sex roughly two weeks earlier — has revived calls for Australia to ban depictions of strangulation in pornography. Fashion Times reported on September 11 that Social Services Minister Tanya Plibersek said the government should look "very seriously" at measures mirroring Britain's, and that there is "no safe way to strangle someone." The investigation into the death remains ongoing, and no evidence has established that pornography caused or contributed to it — a distinction both outlets were careful to draw.

Why It Matters

Australia is now the second major English-speaking jurisdiction to seriously weigh a content-specific pornography ban, and it would be doing so with an enforcement apparatus — eSafety, the online safety codes, an age-verification regime already live — that the UK is still building out. That makes Australia a faster test of whether classification bans actually change platform behaviour or merely relocate the content. For platforms and creators, the compliance question is operational rather than philosophical. A strangulation ban requires classifiers capable of distinguishing applied pressure from staged hand placement, across enormous back catalogues, in jurisdictions that define the act differently. That is a moderation-technology problem, and it will be solved by the same automated classification vendors now selling age estimation. Expect the content-moderation AI segment to treat this as an addressable market. The unresolved tension — voiced by Herbenick, McGlynn and Stabile alike, from very different starting points — is that everyone agrees education is the actual lever, and no one is proposing to fund it at the scale of the enforcement regime. Sexual-wellness and sex-education platforms should read that gap as both a public-health problem and a market opening.

The template on the table is the UK's Crime and Policing Act 2026, which criminalises publishing and possessing pornography depicting strangulation or suffocation. Clare McGlynn, the Durham University law professor whose work has shaped two decades of UK porn regulation, told WIRED the strangulation ban was adopted in April but has not yet been implemented or enforced, meaning no company or individual has faced action. "The platforms aren't going to act in and of themselves," she said. "They're only going to act if they think the regulator is going to take action against them."

The prevalence data driving the debate is genuinely striking. Indiana University's Debby Herbenick, among the leading researchers on sexual strangulation, found in a 2021 survey of nearly 5,000 US college students that 58% of women had been choked during sex and a quarter were first choked by age 17. Australian research cited by Fashion Times covering 4,702 people aged 18–35 found 57% had experienced strangulation during sex and 51% had strangled a partner, with 61% of women surveyed reporting the former. Herbenick cautions that sustained pressure to the throat can cause blood clots and stroke, carotid tears, vision impairment and cumulative brain injury — harms that accrue invisibly rather than dramatically.

The adult industry's counterargument is the one it has made about every content ban: displacement, not elimination. Performer Cherie DeVille pointed WIRED to the age-verification fallout — VPNs, offshore platforms, and a migration toward unregulated content that complies with nothing. Aylo's Pornhub restated its performer-consent policy in a statement to WIRED, while OnlyFans creators have reportedly steered clear of choking content since the platform's 2021 payments-driven crackdown; OnlyFans did not respond to WIRED's question about whether the act is formally banned. Free Speech Coalition public policy director Mike Stabile called porn "an appealing boogeyman," arguing that strangulation imagery is ubiquitous across mainstream culture — Herbenick notes young women more often encounter it through memes, music and prestige television than through porn.

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Update — 2026-09-12

Initial entry — story first created.

Update — 2026-10-04

Forensic clinicians now describe it as a brain-injury problem. Two weeks after our first entry, Australian coverage has shifted from the policy debate to clinical evidence. On September 29, 2026, The Sydney Morning Herald quoted Dr Amelia McLean of the Victorian Institute of Forensic Medicine (VIFM), who warned that women in their early 20s risk becoming "a generation with higher stroke risk at a younger age." She said that when she examines sexual-assault patients, strangulation is rare in patients in their mid-30s but "very, very common" in patients in their early-to-mid 20s, and that many say "Oh, yeah, of course that happened." McLean also pointed to TikTok and YouTube tutorials on how to compress the carotid arteries "safely," and said VIFM is considering its own influencer-led awareness campaign. Monash Health emergency director Dr Neil Goldie compared the cumulative harm to repeated concussions in footballers.

The ABC (September 27) ran a youth panel with Breathless campaign co-founder Maree Crabbe, who cited research showing strangulation went from appearing in "basically zero per cent" of popular porn scenes in the early 2000s to 15 per cent by 2024. The ABC also confirmed that Social Services Minister Tanya Plibersek has called for depictions of strangulation in porn to be banned. Both outlets cited the 4,702-person University of Queensland/Melbourne study (Archives of Sexual Behavior, 2024): 57% of 18-35-year-olds had been strangled during sex, and pornography was the most common source people cited for learning about the practice (61%). University of Melbourne's Heather Douglas cautioned that "the prohibition narrative can be something young people don't respond to."

Read: The argument for a ban is moving from content harm to public health, with forensic, ER and stroke-risk evidence. That framing tends to support legislation. SMH also noted that pet-style slip chains marketed for women's necks are sold openly on Etsy, which brings mainstream marketplaces and adult retailers into a debate that so far has focused on porn platforms. No bill has been tabled yet.

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