Jan Wynne-Jones knows almost nothing about her daughter Vicky’s last living moments. She only knows that Vicky, a tall, blond, 25-year-old newlywed who worked as an account manager and who could calculate a balance sheet or assemble a wardrobe without breaking a sweat, was strangled by her husband one night in November in 2009.
Vicky had married Michael Roberts just five months earlier, but the couple had been together for four years and lived close to their families in Warrington, in Cheshire. Jan, her husband and their three other children saw Roberts as part of the family. There had been no “warning signs”, no evidence of abuse or flashes of temper.
According to Roberts, Vicky’s death had been a terrible accident, a “sex game gone wrong”. In court, he pleaded not guilty to her murder, claiming they had been having sex on the sofa with a bathrobe cord around Vicky’s neck and she had instructed him, three times, to “pull tighter”. When she slumped to the floor, he thought she was joking and waited for her to sit up and say, “Boo!” When he realised his wife was dead, he sat in the corner and cried.
“I knew it wasn’t true, but I didn’t want to protest too much,” says Jan. “For three days, we had to sit and listen to him. I thought: ‘Haven’t you done enough?’ There were only two people there when it happened and the jury can only hear from one of them – that’s massive. That’s the thing you can’t change.”
Fortunately, there was ample evidence to speak for Vicky. The pathology report showed her injuries could not have been inflicted by a dressing gown cord and the force used was excessive. Roberts had snapped a hyoid bone in the front of her neck. He hadn’t called an ambulance. He hid Vicky’s body in the garage and told her family she had left him for another man. His phone showed he had been conducting affairs with at least three women, calling one of them constantly on the night in question. A letter written by Vicky was found in the apartment, which revealed that she had discovered something of Roberts’s infidelities and given him a deadline – which fell on the weekend she died.
The jury found Roberts guilty of murder and he was sentenced to a minimum of 17 years. He has never told the truth about what really happened. “He took away Vicky, her choices, her chances, her future,” says Vicky’s sister, Lindsey Wynne-Jones. “And then he took her dignity. Even now, it’s the ‘sex game gone wrong’ that gets focused on. Even though it was disproved, it’s always going to be there.”
Just one month after the trial, another woman – Michelle Stonall – was found strangled with her dog’s lead in Sheldon Country Park, Birmingham. Her killer used the same “sex game” defence. Less than two months after that, Anna Banks, a 25-year-old classroom assistant, was strangled by her boyfriend of four months. Daniel Lancaster claimed that Banks “enjoyed being throttled during intercourse”. He was not found guilty of murder but guilty of manslaughter and given a four-year sentence.
Since December last year, a group of women have attempted to gather “sex games gone wrong” defence killings under one place – the website We Can’t Consent to This. In the decade since Vicky’s murder, such killings have risen by 90%. Two thirds involve strangulation.
Strangulation – fatal and non-fatal – “squeezing”, “neck compression” or, as some call, it “breath-play” – is highly gendered. On average, one woman in the UK is strangled to death by her partner every two weeks, according to Women’s Aid. It is a frequent feature of non-fatal domestic assault, as well as rape and robbery where women are the victims. It is striking how seldom it is seen in crimes against men.
Numerous studies have shown that non-fatal strangulation is one of the highest markers for future homicide, which is why Australia, New Zealand, Canada and most US states have developed preventative legislation to strengthen police, prosecutorial and sentencing policies that surround it. In most US states, for example, it is now compulsory for police to charge strangulation assaults as felonies. Yet in the UK, they can fall under battery – the mildest assault possible.
Susan Edwards, a barrister and law professor, has spent decades fighting to make strangulation a stand-alone offence. “In the UK, it’s routinely minimised at every level,” she says. “It’s presented as a momentary loss of control. Attempted strangulations often leave no visible injury and fatal cases too frequently end in light sentences. You hear things such as ‘lover’s tiff’. A cardiac arrest can occur within seconds during strangulation, so there’s also the defence that strangulation wasn’t the cause of death.”
And now, a new defence has been added to the mix – consent. Fiona Mackenzie, an actuary, set up We Can’t Consent to This following the outcry over the so-called “rough sex killing” of Natalie Connolly, 26, by her millionaire partner John Broadhurst, 40. Despite the victim having 40 separate injuries, including serious internal trauma, a fractured eye socket and bleach on her face, Broadhurst received a sentence of three years, eight months for manslaughter.
“People were talking about this defence as if it was one isolated incident and I knew it wasn’t,” says Mackenzie. Although English law does not recognise consent to choking – or any physical harm – in the context of consensual sex, the Labour MP Harriet Harman has just announced her intention to have this underlined again in the forthcoming domestic violence bill. “It needs more emphasis because defence teams are increasingly offering it up, maybe because rough sex has crept into the mainstream,” says Mackenzie. “I’ve had so many women get in touch to say they have been horrified on Tinder dates by partners who have choked them during sex. If you’re dating, it’s expected of you and if you don’t go along with it, you’re boring.”
This is how Amber*, now 27, felt when she was first choked during sex in 2012 in Dublin. “I had met a friend of a friend on a night out and we went back to his. He was being rougher with me than I was used to, but I didn’t think anything of it. He grazed his hand on my neck – again, I didn’t think anything of it – then he started to squeeze.”
The choking wasn’t firm enough to cause Amber much discomfort. “I wanted to be attractive to him. So I just thought: ‘OK, this is what gets him off, I’ll let him.’” She had just come out of a long-term relationship. “So I figured: this must be how people have sex now.”
Lucy*, 33, who met a man on Tinder last September, describes a similar experience. “He was a very handsome guy, well turned out,” she says. They went on a date: dinner and drinks. Afterwards, Lucy went to his house, where they moved to the bedroom. “This is where it gets a little bit blurry,” Lucy recalls. “I was drunk, but I could consent. He asked if he could choke me and I said yes – I had done it before.” Previously, the choking had not been “a big deal” – a minor part in the whole experience and comparable to “a bit of hair pulling”; that is to say, a quick and small amount of pain intended to be pleasurable.
“But the next thing I remember is waking up gasping for breath with him on top of me. I’m not sure how long I passed out for. I booked an Uber at 6.30am to get the hell out of there. The next day, I saw the bruises on my chest. We spoke after this and all he said was that, ‘we both got a bit carried away’.”
Mackenzie points to two recent strangulation cases that ended in verdicts of manslaughter. Chloe Miazek, 20, who was strangled by Mark Bruce after meeting him at a bus stop and going to his flat in Aberdeen in November 2017. Mark Bruce, 32, was sentenced to six years. His defence argued that “erotic sexual asphyxiation” was something that Miazek had expressed interest in with previous sexual partners.
Hannah Pearson, from Lincolnshire, was 16 when she was strangled by James Morton, 24, whom she had met on the day of her death in July 2016. His defence said he was looking to pursue “his sexual thrill without having regard for the consequences of it”. The jury cleared him of murder but he got 12 years for manslaughter.
“Both those women were very young, and very drunk, killed by much older men they had met just hours before,” Mackenzie says.
How did strangulation become so widespread? Autoerotic asphyxia – when someone restricts oxygen to their own brain for the purposes of arousal – isn’t new: there have been documented cases since the early 17th century. But, historically, it has been “niche” and an overwhelmingly male pastime. And the serious risks it has always carried can be seen in the two high-profile examples of the deaths of the MP Stephen Milligan and the actor David Carradine.
Now, though, it is women being choked – Mackenzie hasn’t found a single case of a man killed by a woman in an alleged “sex game gone wrong”. And sex surveys, advice forums, social media feeds and women’s magazines show the way the practice has become mainstream. “If blindfolds and role play have veered into vanilla territory, there are still plenty of sex moves … like choking,” suggests Women’s Health. “Breath play, the risque new sex practice gripping millennials,” offers Flare. On elitedaily.com, one sex educator was quoted as saying anyone stuck in a sex rut could read up on “how to choke your partner safely”.
Gail Dines, the feminist thinker and CEO of Culture Reframed, believes strangulation has been normalised via two main routes. “For the men, it’s pornography and for the women, it’s in women’s magazines,” she says. “And both of these media genres legitimise it as a form of ‘play’.” She describes choking as a “number one standard act” on porn sites and says women look to porn to “see what men want and they see choking”.
The link between strangulation and porn was made almost 20 years ago, when the teacher and classical musician Jane Longhurst was strangled with a pair of tights by her best friend’s boyfriend, Graham Coutts. Coutts (who also used the ‘consenting sex’ defence) was described in court as having an obsession with violent pornography. After the trial, Longhurst’s family campaigned for a ban on violent porn, which eventually led to section 63 of the 2008 Criminal Justice and Immigration Act, making it illegal to possess an extreme pornographic image which included acts that threaten a person’s life. However, the cases that have come to court have been ones involving bestiality or child abuse. “It’s not used for scenes of violence, strangulation and rape, which is what was intended,” says Edwards.
Erika Lust, one of the world’s only female porn directors, agrees that strangulation and choking scenes now dominate porn. “Face slapping, choking, gagging and spitting has become the alpha and omega of any porn scene and not within a BDSM context,” she says. “These are presented as standard ways to have sex when, in fact, they are niches.”
When a direct threat to life is slowly normalised, “it means that a woman whose partner chokes her might not report it – and if she does, it might go nowhere,” says Edwards. “It means that if a woman dies this way, judges and juries feel ‘this is how people have sex now’ and questions aren’t always asked.”
Lust points out that if sex education is inadequate, “young people will go to the internet for answers. Many people’s first exposure to sex is hardcore porn”. This, she says, teaches kids “that men should be rough and demanding, and that degradation is standard.”
One young man who spoke to the Guardian for this piece said he chokes his girlfriend, and has done for several years, “because she likes it”. Days later, he got in touch again. “I thought about our conversation and asked her about it. She said she doesn’t actually like it; she thought I liked it. But the thing is, I don’t: I thought it’s what she wanted.”
Sarah* was a witness in a “sex game gone wrong” case that ended with a not guilty verdict. She lived in the flat below the victim – someone who had spent time in prison for drugs and sex work offences and seemed warm, friendly and very vulnerable.
One afternoon, Sarah heard arguments interspersed by laughter upstairs. Her neighbour shouted: “Get off me!” There was a sound of falling to the floor, followed by scuffling, then sex, then quiet. Later that evening, Sarah went upstairs because water was dripping through her ceiling. Her neighbour’s door was ajar, the kitchen tap left on – she turned it off and went to the bedroom.
“I saw my neighbour hanging from a rope,” she says. A man slept beside her. Sarah says that one police officer asked her if her neighbour was “the local entertainment”.
The case took a long time to come to trial. The victim – who had more than 30 injuries – was a troubled woman, the jury was told. She had sent “dirty” texts. The man who had been sleeping beside her insisted that he had only ever had “normal sex”. Although Sarah – and another neighbour – thought there had been two men in the flat, no one else was charged. The sex game gone wrong was something the police or Crown Prosecution Service came up with, not the defence. “It felt that the police thought she had somehow asked for it,” says Sarah. “The ‘sex game gone wrong’ story was a way of blaming everyone and no one.” The sleeping man was found not guilty. Nothing was ever explained.
The dead woman was a mother, a sister, a daughter – all her family were at the trial. Sarah cannot imagine the impact on them. “I can see that she would be considered a difficult victim to present to a jury,” she says. “However, as far as I know, ‘Get off me’ were very possibly the last words she spoke.”
The Wynne-Jones family did get the verdict they wanted – Roberts is 10 years into his sentence, but to Vicky’s mother, it feels like no time at all. “For the people who have to go through what we did and then walk away with a charge of manslaughter and a four-year sentence – that doesn’t put a lot of worth on a person’s life.”
* Some names have been changed