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Professor Susan Edwards reviews efforts to regulate strangulation and suffocation pornography. Will the s 63(7A)(aa) amendment to the Criminal Justice and Immigration Act 2008 achieve its statutory purpose?
Each year, the United Nations runs 16 Days of Activism, a global campaign to end violence against women and girls (VAWG). #NoExcuse for online abuse, which ran from 25 November to 10 December last year, focused on one of the fastest-growing forms of abuse against women and girls: technology-facilitated gender violence.
On 18 December 2025, the government published its long-awaited strategy to halve VAWG in a decade: Freedom from Violence and Abuse: a cross-government strategy to build a safer society for women and girls. Taking a whole-of-society approach, the wide-ranging strategy includes tackling the availability and accessibility of extreme violent and misogynistic pornography online, which is driving an alarming uptick in dangerous sexual behaviours offline with life-threatening consequences.
In February 2025 Baroness Bertin published the findings of her Independent Pornography Review, Creating a safer world: the challenge of regulating online pornography. The Bertin report details the multivarious forms of violent and sexual abuse against women and children widely available on web platforms, research findings on the connection between sex crime and pornography and calls for regulation of the material that legitimises and encourages such violence.
For example, a survey carried out by the Institute for Addressing Strangulation in 2025 revealed disturbing evidence of the prevalence of choking: 55% of 4,175 individuals reported being strangled/choked or having strangled someone else during sex. Ofcom found that 13.8 million of UK adults accessed an online porn content service; 35% of men say they watch pornography at least once a week; and 44% of children under nine years of age have accessed violent pornography (Bertin report, pp 46-7).
The Online Safety Act 2023 (OSA) establishes Ofcom as the designated regulator placing duties on the providers of services to regulate illegal content. User to user services are required to manage risk of harm, and ensure priority illegal content is taken down swiftly, and prevent users from encountering such content. As to regulation of porn services (ss 79-82) providers must implement age verification assurance measures, for example, facial scans or credit card checks to prevent children from accidentally or intentionally accessing such content.
On 9 December 2025, the government amendment to clause 84 of the Crime and Policing Bill 2025, moved by Baroness Levitt following the Bertin Review, was approved by the House of Lords. This amends s 63(7A)(aa) of the Criminal Justice and Immigration Act (CJIA) 2008 to criminalise the ‘possession or publication of pornographic images of strangulation or suffocation’, defined as ‘an act which affects a person’s ability to breathe and constitutes battery of that person’. An image is pornographic, ‘if it is of such a nature that it must reasonably be assumed to have been produced solely or principally for the purpose of sexual arousal’ (s 63(3)). For this offence, the strangulation or suffocation portrayed must be explicit and realistic, but it does not have to be real, it can be acted or posed, or AI-generated – provided that the people in the image look real to a reasonable person.
This new provision will extend the reach of CJIA s 63(2)(a)(b) criminalising an ‘extreme pornographic image’ defined in s 63(5A)(b) as an image that is ‘grossly offensive, disgusting or otherwise of an obscene character’ by adding an image of choking to the list of acts prohibited in s 63(7)(a to d). This includes acts which threaten a person’s life (emphasis added) or are likely to result in serious injury to a person’s anus, breasts or genitals; sexual interference with a human corpse or performing an act of intercourse or oral sex with an animal (whether dead or alive). The 2015 amendment (s 63(7A)(a)(b)) added ‘an act which involves the non-consensual penetration of a person’s vagina, anus or mouth by another with the other person’s penis, …or with a part of the other person’s body or anything else’.
The strangulation and suffocation amendment enters into law 20 years after an unsuccessful campaign to ban porn websites initiated by Liz Longhurst whose daughter Jane Longhurst was strangled and murdered by Graham Coutts ([2006] UKHL 39). Coutts claimed the deceased had consented. Evidence was adduced as to his interest in asphyxial sex and having visited several pornographic websites before and after her death.
Depictions – and real instances – of strangulation are habituated in femicide, coercive control and VAWG. It is a motif and a real act within and outside pornography which had long been the focus of Andrea Dworkin’s rage and activism (Pornography: Men Possessing Women, 1981) and preoccupied legal arguments of the celebrated human rights lawyer, Catharine MacKinnon (Only Words, 1992). Both railed against the incoming tide of misogyny and its indirect and direct impacts while attempts were made to silence them by invoking First Amendment protections. Dworkin was direct, confrontational and uncompromising. For her, women’s degradation and abuse was tied to male arousal and orgasm. Dworkin and MacKinnon argued that the Obscene Publications Act 1959 with its ‘deprave and corrupt’ acid test for pornography failed to understand or grapple with the demonstrable fact that pornography was violence against women. Dworkin did not live to see the harm of the digital revolution and its inexorable capacity for violence against women (for example, deep-fake porn in the Holly Willoughby case; and image-based sexual abuse in the Georgia Harrison case).
The concrete harms of non-fatal strangulation (NFS) were criminalised in Domestic Abuse Act (DAA) 2021 s 1 (amending Serious Crime Act (SCA) 2015 s 75A). Strangulation is a feature of coercive control well known to the family courts (see GA v CB [2025] EWFC 400 (B); A v B [2023] EWCA Civ 360) and to criminal law practitioners. In 2018, Grace Millane, a British backpacker in New Zealand, was strangled and murdered by Jesse Kempson on their first date, a man she had met on Tinder. His defence of accident was unsuccessful, the jury were unpersuaded by his assertions that she had previously engaged in ‘rough sex’ and had asked him to choke her during consensual sex. In 2021, Warren Coulton was convicted of gross negligence manslaughter. He claimed to have engaged in consensual ‘rough sex’ with the deceased who died of asphyxiation following being gagged. In R v Pybus ([2021] EWCA Crim 1787) the defendant was convicted of unlawful manslaughter. He claimed that the deceased had consented to being choked and had encouraged him to strangle her during consensual sex. This death toll through strangulation of women continues (see R v Alidov (Arif ) [2025] EWCA Crim 1403). In 2024, the Sentencing Council responded introducing a new statutory aggravating factor for those who cause death ‘through abusive, degrading and dangerous sexual behaviour,’ and in 2025, Sch 21 (para 9) of the Sentencing Act 2020 was amended to include ‘strangulation, suffocation or asphyxiation’ as aggravating factors in cases of murder.
NFS is a feature of rape (R v Shah (Zaheer) [2025] EWCA Crim 1459, R v Hamad (Mahmood) [2025] EWCA Crim 1503, HM Advocate v McMahon [2025] HCJAC 34, Kirkup v HM Advocate [2025] HCJAC 9, R v Charnock [2021] EWCA Crim 100); and intimate partner abuse and coercive control (HM Advocate v Moran [2025] HCJAC 52, R v Sladden [2025] EWCA Crim 1410, R v Morley (Scott) [2025] EWCA Crim 1249, R v Miah [2025] EWCA Crim 1100). In such cases there is evidence of the defendant’s interest in violent and choking pornography (e.g., R v Hills [2018] EWCA Crim 1056, R v Storey (Joe John) [2017] EWCA Crim 1988).
In the digital world, the OSA and regulators, the police, Ofcom, the Advertising Standards Authority and Committee of Advertising Practice (e.g., ASA CAP 2022 ruling on OneSoft Studio) and the Games Regulating Authority, among others, will be tasked to ‘police’ choking pornography both real and its representation ‘acted or posed’ along with harmful gender stereotypes.
But how effective will the new CJIA amendment be? McGlynn and Bow’s research concluded that s 63(7)(a-d) and s 63(7A)(a)(b)) were ineffective in dealing with pornographic images of violence against women and rape (Journal of Criminal Law 2019, Vol. 83(6) 473). Little has changed! In my perusal of criminal appeals using the search word ‘extreme pornography’ from 2015 to the present (Westlaw as per 31.12.2025) 57 appeals involved child pornography and in 19 of those appeals there were additional counts involving material depicting bestiality between women and animals. Given that the section includes acts that ‘threatened a person’s life’, the absence of such prosecutions demonstrates the abject failure of the section to achieve its purpose.
Pornographers and those who consider themselves defenders of ‘artistic’ boundaries and ‘freedom’ will continue to push the envelope (see R v the Video Appeals Committee of the British Board of Film Classification (BBFC), ex p. BBFC, ([2000] 5 WLUK 379 (QBD); Edwards Crim Law Rev 2001:305) and R (on the application of British Board of Film Classification) v Video Appeals Committee [2008] EWHC 203 (Admin). Rolling back the tide to 2002, the BBFC defended its decision to grant the certification of Baise-moi with one cut, in which two young women are both brutally raped. Irreversible, a film with a nine-minute rape scene, was granted a certificate. Both films are currently certificated.
Regimes of misogynist meaning are not confined to porn and exist in art and literature causing indirect harms. Such cultural forms are fiercely protected, its protagonists claiming polysemy of meaning and interpretative ambiguity, even when embedded with sexist codes of submission and degradation sexualising violence and often the death of the female subject. Guy Bourdin’s collection of photographs in Exhibit A (Bullfinch Press: 2001) produced mainly for Vogue and fashion designer Charles Jourdan is a case in point. Bourdin is described as one of the most important visual artists of our time, his oeuvre described as ‘surreal’and ‘fetishist’. One photograph (No. 50) comprises two dead women – one naked and sexualised lying on a plinth and the other clothed with a cord round her neck as if hanging. Stylised, arranged ‘acted or posed’ but is it art? Ambiguous? Or didactic? An article on a Bourdin exhibition entitled ‘Death becomes her’ discussed the photographer’s portrayal of women and obsession with body parts and death. In a later article another critic writes Bourdin ‘shaped our conception of glamour’ while acknowledging that his ‘seeming delight in female subjection may prove too unpalatable for some’ (see R v Reynolds [2014] EWCA Crim 2205).
Then there is the written word, claiming anything from artistic expression to exploring sexual freedom – Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho to Marquis de Sade’s Juliette (the latter heralded as the embodiment of the philosophy of enlightenment). In 2020, Cosmopolitan published an article entitled ‘Behold: Cosmo’s 85 Best Sex Tips Ever’ – tip no. 74 detailed ‘gagging’ women during sex, adding to this nadir of construction of women’s sexuality to serve men.
The regulatory efforts of OSA and CJIA are a small part of the solution. A collective responsibility, at every level, is called for, including publishers, educators, influencers, campaigners, activists and politicians, in rooting out abuse not only within but outside pornography in all cultural expressions in building a safer society for women and girls and boys, and also for men (the main consumers and perpetrators) in ensuring healthier relationships and lives.
Each year, the United Nations runs 16 Days of Activism, a global campaign to end violence against women and girls (VAWG). #NoExcuse for online abuse, which ran from 25 November to 10 December last year, focused on one of the fastest-growing forms of abuse against women and girls: technology-facilitated gender violence.
On 18 December 2025, the government published its long-awaited strategy to halve VAWG in a decade: Freedom from Violence and Abuse: a cross-government strategy to build a safer society for women and girls. Taking a whole-of-society approach, the wide-ranging strategy includes tackling the availability and accessibility of extreme violent and misogynistic pornography online, which is driving an alarming uptick in dangerous sexual behaviours offline with life-threatening consequences.
In February 2025 Baroness Bertin published the findings of her Independent Pornography Review, Creating a safer world: the challenge of regulating online pornography. The Bertin report details the multivarious forms of violent and sexual abuse against women and children widely available on web platforms, research findings on the connection between sex crime and pornography and calls for regulation of the material that legitimises and encourages such violence.
For example, a survey carried out by the Institute for Addressing Strangulation in 2025 revealed disturbing evidence of the prevalence of choking: 55% of 4,175 individuals reported being strangled/choked or having strangled someone else during sex. Ofcom found that 13.8 million of UK adults accessed an online porn content service; 35% of men say they watch pornography at least once a week; and 44% of children under nine years of age have accessed violent pornography (Bertin report, pp 46-7).
The Online Safety Act 2023 (OSA) establishes Ofcom as the designated regulator placing duties on the providers of services to regulate illegal content. User to user services are required to manage risk of harm, and ensure priority illegal content is taken down swiftly, and prevent users from encountering such content. As to regulation of porn services (ss 79-82) providers must implement age verification assurance measures, for example, facial scans or credit card checks to prevent children from accidentally or intentionally accessing such content.
On 9 December 2025, the government amendment to clause 84 of the Crime and Policing Bill 2025, moved by Baroness Levitt following the Bertin Review, was approved by the House of Lords. This amends s 63(7A)(aa) of the Criminal Justice and Immigration Act (CJIA) 2008 to criminalise the ‘possession or publication of pornographic images of strangulation or suffocation’, defined as ‘an act which affects a person’s ability to breathe and constitutes battery of that person’. An image is pornographic, ‘if it is of such a nature that it must reasonably be assumed to have been produced solely or principally for the purpose of sexual arousal’ (s 63(3)). For this offence, the strangulation or suffocation portrayed must be explicit and realistic, but it does not have to be real, it can be acted or posed, or AI-generated – provided that the people in the image look real to a reasonable person.
This new provision will extend the reach of CJIA s 63(2)(a)(b) criminalising an ‘extreme pornographic image’ defined in s 63(5A)(b) as an image that is ‘grossly offensive, disgusting or otherwise of an obscene character’ by adding an image of choking to the list of acts prohibited in s 63(7)(a to d). This includes acts which threaten a person’s life (emphasis added) or are likely to result in serious injury to a person’s anus, breasts or genitals; sexual interference with a human corpse or performing an act of intercourse or oral sex with an animal (whether dead or alive). The 2015 amendment (s 63(7A)(a)(b)) added ‘an act which involves the non-consensual penetration of a person’s vagina, anus or mouth by another with the other person’s penis, …or with a part of the other person’s body or anything else’.
The strangulation and suffocation amendment enters into law 20 years after an unsuccessful campaign to ban porn websites initiated by Liz Longhurst whose daughter Jane Longhurst was strangled and murdered by Graham Coutts ([2006] UKHL 39). Coutts claimed the deceased had consented. Evidence was adduced as to his interest in asphyxial sex and having visited several pornographic websites before and after her death.
Depictions – and real instances – of strangulation are habituated in femicide, coercive control and VAWG. It is a motif and a real act within and outside pornography which had long been the focus of Andrea Dworkin’s rage and activism (Pornography: Men Possessing Women, 1981) and preoccupied legal arguments of the celebrated human rights lawyer, Catharine MacKinnon (Only Words, 1992). Both railed against the incoming tide of misogyny and its indirect and direct impacts while attempts were made to silence them by invoking First Amendment protections. Dworkin was direct, confrontational and uncompromising. For her, women’s degradation and abuse was tied to male arousal and orgasm. Dworkin and MacKinnon argued that the Obscene Publications Act 1959 with its ‘deprave and corrupt’ acid test for pornography failed to understand or grapple with the demonstrable fact that pornography was violence against women. Dworkin did not live to see the harm of the digital revolution and its inexorable capacity for violence against women (for example, deep-fake porn in the Holly Willoughby case; and image-based sexual abuse in the Georgia Harrison case).
The concrete harms of non-fatal strangulation (NFS) were criminalised in Domestic Abuse Act (DAA) 2021 s 1 (amending Serious Crime Act (SCA) 2015 s 75A). Strangulation is a feature of coercive control well known to the family courts (see GA v CB [2025] EWFC 400 (B); A v B [2023] EWCA Civ 360) and to criminal law practitioners. In 2018, Grace Millane, a British backpacker in New Zealand, was strangled and murdered by Jesse Kempson on their first date, a man she had met on Tinder. His defence of accident was unsuccessful, the jury were unpersuaded by his assertions that she had previously engaged in ‘rough sex’ and had asked him to choke her during consensual sex. In 2021, Warren Coulton was convicted of gross negligence manslaughter. He claimed to have engaged in consensual ‘rough sex’ with the deceased who died of asphyxiation following being gagged. In R v Pybus ([2021] EWCA Crim 1787) the defendant was convicted of unlawful manslaughter. He claimed that the deceased had consented to being choked and had encouraged him to strangle her during consensual sex. This death toll through strangulation of women continues (see R v Alidov (Arif ) [2025] EWCA Crim 1403). In 2024, the Sentencing Council responded introducing a new statutory aggravating factor for those who cause death ‘through abusive, degrading and dangerous sexual behaviour,’ and in 2025, Sch 21 (para 9) of the Sentencing Act 2020 was amended to include ‘strangulation, suffocation or asphyxiation’ as aggravating factors in cases of murder.
NFS is a feature of rape (R v Shah (Zaheer) [2025] EWCA Crim 1459, R v Hamad (Mahmood) [2025] EWCA Crim 1503, HM Advocate v McMahon [2025] HCJAC 34, Kirkup v HM Advocate [2025] HCJAC 9, R v Charnock [2021] EWCA Crim 100); and intimate partner abuse and coercive control (HM Advocate v Moran [2025] HCJAC 52, R v Sladden [2025] EWCA Crim 1410, R v Morley (Scott) [2025] EWCA Crim 1249, R v Miah [2025] EWCA Crim 1100). In such cases there is evidence of the defendant’s interest in violent and choking pornography (e.g., R v Hills [2018] EWCA Crim 1056, R v Storey (Joe John) [2017] EWCA Crim 1988).
In the digital world, the OSA and regulators, the police, Ofcom, the Advertising Standards Authority and Committee of Advertising Practice (e.g., ASA CAP 2022 ruling on OneSoft Studio) and the Games Regulating Authority, among others, will be tasked to ‘police’ choking pornography both real and its representation ‘acted or posed’ along with harmful gender stereotypes.
But how effective will the new CJIA amendment be? McGlynn and Bow’s research concluded that s 63(7)(a-d) and s 63(7A)(a)(b)) were ineffective in dealing with pornographic images of violence against women and rape (Journal of Criminal Law 2019, Vol. 83(6) 473). Little has changed! In my perusal of criminal appeals using the search word ‘extreme pornography’ from 2015 to the present (Westlaw as per 31.12.2025) 57 appeals involved child pornography and in 19 of those appeals there were additional counts involving material depicting bestiality between women and animals. Given that the section includes acts that ‘threatened a person’s life’, the absence of such prosecutions demonstrates the abject failure of the section to achieve its purpose.
Pornographers and those who consider themselves defenders of ‘artistic’ boundaries and ‘freedom’ will continue to push the envelope (see R v the Video Appeals Committee of the British Board of Film Classification (BBFC), ex p. BBFC, ([2000] 5 WLUK 379 (QBD); Edwards Crim Law Rev 2001:305) and R (on the application of British Board of Film Classification) v Video Appeals Committee [2008] EWHC 203 (Admin). Rolling back the tide to 2002, the BBFC defended its decision to grant the certification of Baise-moi with one cut, in which two young women are both brutally raped. Irreversible, a film with a nine-minute rape scene, was granted a certificate. Both films are currently certificated.
Regimes of misogynist meaning are not confined to porn and exist in art and literature causing indirect harms. Such cultural forms are fiercely protected, its protagonists claiming polysemy of meaning and interpretative ambiguity, even when embedded with sexist codes of submission and degradation sexualising violence and often the death of the female subject. Guy Bourdin’s collection of photographs in Exhibit A (Bullfinch Press: 2001) produced mainly for Vogue and fashion designer Charles Jourdan is a case in point. Bourdin is described as one of the most important visual artists of our time, his oeuvre described as ‘surreal’and ‘fetishist’. One photograph (No. 50) comprises two dead women – one naked and sexualised lying on a plinth and the other clothed with a cord round her neck as if hanging. Stylised, arranged ‘acted or posed’ but is it art? Ambiguous? Or didactic? An article on a Bourdin exhibition entitled ‘Death becomes her’ discussed the photographer’s portrayal of women and obsession with body parts and death. In a later article another critic writes Bourdin ‘shaped our conception of glamour’ while acknowledging that his ‘seeming delight in female subjection may prove too unpalatable for some’ (see R v Reynolds [2014] EWCA Crim 2205).
Then there is the written word, claiming anything from artistic expression to exploring sexual freedom – Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho to Marquis de Sade’s Juliette (the latter heralded as the embodiment of the philosophy of enlightenment). In 2020, Cosmopolitan published an article entitled ‘Behold: Cosmo’s 85 Best Sex Tips Ever’ – tip no. 74 detailed ‘gagging’ women during sex, adding to this nadir of construction of women’s sexuality to serve men.
The regulatory efforts of OSA and CJIA are a small part of the solution. A collective responsibility, at every level, is called for, including publishers, educators, influencers, campaigners, activists and politicians, in rooting out abuse not only within but outside pornography in all cultural expressions in building a safer society for women and girls and boys, and also for men (the main consumers and perpetrators) in ensuring healthier relationships and lives.
Professor Susan Edwards reviews efforts to regulate strangulation and suffocation pornography. Will the s 63(7A)(aa) amendment to the Criminal Justice and Immigration Act 2008 achieve its statutory purpose?
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