Debby Herbenick is a researcher of sexual behavior and is the director of the Center for Sexual Health Promotion at Indiana University. Her book Yes, Your Kid explores the growing trend amongst sexually active teenagers of engaging in choking, or sexual strangulation.

This is an important read for those of you who are parents of adolescents – although you may not want to read it.

And it is important for adolescents themselves, although it is not likely that many of them will read it either.

Herbenick calls the information “lifesaving.”

She wants kids, and parents to know that sexual strangulation is dangerous, even life threatening.

Evidently, many kids think their partners expect to be choked during sex.

But why?

The depiction of sexual strangulation in porn may have led some kids to try it. After all, all kids have access to porn at this point, and most have watched some.

And those same teens may have thought that choking is part of a normal sexual experience.

In fact, the rise of the use of sexual strangulation amongst older teens and college age kids has been meteoric. According to Herbenick, the number of teen girls between the ages of 12 and 17 who say that a partner has choked them during sex has risen to forty per cent. Two decades ago, sexual asphyxiation was unusual amongst any demographic, let alone young people.

The problem is that sexual strangulation can lead to unintentional unconsciousness or even death.

And some researchers, including Keisuke Kawata, a neuroscientist at Indiana University, thinks that each non-lethal episode can cause damage to the brain, similar to the ways that CTE‘s experienced by football players do.

It’s time to approach this issue with our teens.

It may be hard – but it is crucial.

Once your child is around 14, you can have a discussion about consent and its importance. And during that discussion, you can bring up the fact that lots of kids watch porn – but that not everything that happens in porn should happen in real life – just like the fact that not everything that happens in movies (chase scenes, shootings, dystopian disasters, etc.) should happen in reality.

You can talk with your kids about what they think their partners might want or expect and where these ideas come from.

This can lead to talking about how some things shown in porn are actually dangerous – and how porn does not show you that part.

Again, this is hard to talk about – but the time to start is now.

References

Yes, Your Kid, What parents need to know about today’s teens and sex, Debby Herbenick et al.

Peggy Orenstein, New York Times, The Teen Trend of Sexual Choking (4/12/2024)