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An anti-trafficking campaigner has welcomed the ban on pornography featuring strangulation, known as “choking”, saying it will help stop young people thinking it is a normal and safe practice.
Samantha Browne, who suffered exploitation as a teenager in the adult industry, said the ban would help prevent children mimicking violent sex they have seen onscreen, and she hoped it would open the door to ending other forms of abusive pornography.
The amendment to the crime and policing bill will make it a criminal offence to possess or publish porn featuring strangulation or suffocation. Platforms will have to take action to ensure it is not available to people in the UK.
While critics said it would be difficult to police given that most porn consumed in the UK is produced overseas, Browne, a former adult performer who now delivers workshops in schools about consent and exploitation, said it would help children understand they did not need to carry out or tolerate abusive sex acts.
“The reality is that this industry is pushing abuse, it’s normalising abuse, and it’s now infiltrating our young people to the point of possible no return,” she said.
Browne described being shocked when she visited a school and a child under 16 asked his teacher how to “choke a girl so that she doesn’t pass out”.
“Kids are turning into abusers because this is what they’re seeing,” she said. “When’s it going to stop?”
Though strangulation has become a mainstream act in porn, research shows it is fundamentally unsafe, as brain injuries can occur even when there is no loss of consciousness or visible sign of harm.
Studies carried out specifically on women who have been repeatedly “choked” during sex show markers for brain damage and disruptions in brain hemispheres linked to depression and anxiety.
It is something Browne herself has suffered, after she was trafficked into the adult industry from the age of 16 and became a high-end performer, filming scenes all over the world.
She featured on Babestation at the age of 17, despite it being illegal for children to act in pornography, and a few days after her 18th birthday was contacted by an agency that offered to sell her “first” videos, which are highly prized in the industry and usually feature the first time they film a particular sexual act.
At the age of 18, she was strangled to the point of unconsciousness by a man who said he was doing it to help her manage the extreme pain she was suffering in a scene.
Like most female performers, she was high on drugs and needed to take painkillers to tolerate filming certain scenes. “There’s a part of you I think internally, mentally and spiritually, that you have to cut off to be able to put your body through that,” she said.
Now 36, after leaving the industry at the age of 21, she has been responsible for convicting a man who groomed her. She also became a campaigner and runs a social enterprise, Diamond You Projects, which works with children to prevent exploitation.
She believes the popularity of “choking”, and other abusive acts such as hitting and spitting, was due to porn becoming more extreme every year as users become desensitised to what they are seeing. “Do people really want to face the facts of where this is going and how dark it really is?”
In researching the effects of porn, Browne has come across studies showing compulsive watchers being driven to “more hardcore” content. Men were frequently suffering erectile dysfunction as a result of their porn use and it was common for people to find they could no longer get aroused by their partner.
“That is part of the adult industry, it’s a weapon of mass destruction in my eyes,” she said.
Though the porn industry is well known to be rife with exploitation, slavery and child sexual abuse, Browne has been criticised for campaigning against trafficking and extreme acts.
She said: “I think it’s the one industry where human rights abuses are allowed and people are clapping for it at the same time. It’s wild.”
