Often mistakenly referred to as choking, sexual strangulation in the mainstream is new. It has arrived into the bedrooms of young people via online porn which has become part of life, one of the many addictive services generously provided by tech companies making billions of dollars. Some companies do a good job of cleaning up the urgent issues of child sexual abuse material and trafficking, but still, violent porn proliferates.

Research that has analysed thousands of randomly chosen videos from popular pornographic websites found that physical aggression like strangulation, slapping and hair-pulling was present in 35-45% of scenes, depending on the website.

It’s important to be wary of clutching our pearls about porn here – there is no evidence to suggest that watching ethical porn results in an upswing in violent behaviour, but research released last year by the Australian Institute of Criminology does indeed show that more frequent intentional viewing of violent pornography is associated with a “small but statistically significant” increase in violence against women by men after they watched violent porn.

Some other facts to make you weep: sexual strangulation is now thought to be the second most common cause of strokes in women under 40 in the UK. It can lead to seizures, brain damage, memory issues, depression, anxiety. Two years ago an Australian study found that more than half of 4,700 people aged between 18 and 35 had engaged in sexual strangulation. A majority of them, 61%, had seen it depicted in porn. Others had seen it in movies, talked about it with friends.

Research that has analysed thousands of randomly chosen videos from popular pornographic websites found that physical aggression like strangulation, slapping and hair-pulling was present in 35-45% of scenes, depending on the website.

It’s important to be wary of clutching our pearls about porn here – there is no evidence to suggest that watching ethical porn results in an upswing in violent behaviour, but research released last year by the Australian Institute of Criminology does indeed show that more frequent intentional viewing of violent pornography is associated with a “small but statistically significant” increase in violence against women by men after they watched violent porn.

Couple this with the knowledge that one in three Australian children have seen online porn and that the average age of initial consumption of porn is 13 – and we can all feel a desperate kind of sorrow for adolescents navigating this world. Girls thinking this is what boys want, boys thinking that this is what girls want. The confusion, the painful wanting to be wanted, that perennial need to be thought of as cool that comes with teenagehood, all of it is now shadowed by the normalisation of something that is clearly dangerous – as any medical expert will tell you, there is no safe way to lose oxygen to the brain.

...I know from personal experience how hard it is to have the conversation about porn with young children. You look at your sweet prepubescent boy child and think he is definitely the only child on the planet not being exposed too early to things he definitely shouldn’t see. He is. They are. Not talking about it is no longer an option.