U.K. MPs Push to Ban Consensual Choking in Porn

LONDON—Anti-pornography campaigners in the United Kingdom's House of Commons wish to include "non-fatal strangulation" in the sweeping Crime and Policing Bill that is currently in the committee phase, reports British tabloid The Daily Mail. Per the report, members of parliament are negotiating the inclusion of an amendment to the Crime and Policing Bill that would define extreme pornography to cover "non-fatal strangulation," potentially banning the act in pornography produced in or consumed by the United Kingdom.  Tory shadow victims minister Alicia Kearns, MP, told the Mail: "Porn has helped to glamourise strangulation, which has led to significant numbers of young people being non-consensually choked during sex and girls told this is a normal expectation." Much of Kearns' claims derive from the independent review on pornography released earlier this year by Baroness Gabrielle Bertin, a Conservative Party (Tory) peer in the House of Lords. Lady Bertin urged the criminalization of consensual adult content. Some of the examples of “extreme” pornography or material that is “legal but harmful” include popular fetishes and kinks, including various categories and subcategories of BDSM, consensual choking, CNC, CBT, age-play, and countless others. Despite failures by the government to contextualize pornography as entertainment for adults and not reality, the solution by the Tories is to ban it all. As AVN reported in February, Lady Bertin’s report, “Creating a Safer World: The Challenge of Regulating Online Pornography,” provided recommendations she and her panel presented as “practical, workable recommendations to help us create a safer world of online pornography for all those involved.” “From the beginning of the process, it was clear that the review had a specific goal—broad censorship of adult content—something we fought about and pushed back against aggressively," shared Mike Stabile in the February report by AVN. Stabile is the director of public policy for the Free Speech Coalition.  He continued, “While the report claims to focus on ‘extreme’ content, in reality, the terms they’re using are vague, ill-defined, subjective, and broad."