My dating app ‘match’ imagined his hands around my neck. This is the age of sexual violence

“Question, do you wear necklaces?” I had matched with someone on the dating app Hinge and we were having some unremarkable small talk. Puzzled by this question, I said I did and asked why he wanted to know.

“I have a necklace I think you might like … my hands.” My eyes rolled so hard they nearly fell out of my head.

“I saw that line on TikTok”, he continued, as if he knew what he said was wrong. I unmatched him.

Casual sexual violence is a common tale for my generation. It’s not unusual to hear a story of an otherwise completely consensual sexual interaction that turned violent. And it’s not always as easy to vet as the above story.

Perpetrators of sexual assault do not all have red flags sticking out of their heads, or a matching tattoo, nor a T-shirt that says, “I have a loose grasp on the concept of ongoing consent”. They are peppered throughout our society, and there’s a good chance they may not even know they have assaulted someone.

The Australian Institute of Criminology reported in December that Australian men who had intentionally viewed violent pornography in the past 12 months were more than twice as likely to have perpetrated sexual violence than those who had not. Before you exit this article with the reassurance that your son, partner or friends are not to be worried about, because they would never watch such violent porn, they may well have.

The proliferation of pornography on the internet has made it more accessible than ever. Be gone, the DVDs in your sock drawer. The volume and breadth of porn available for free have changed society’s relationship with sex fundamentally, and the introduction of algorithms to porn sites has meant that increasingly violent content weaves its way to the top of the Pornhub landing page. Like other forms of social media, sites such as Pornhub reward increasingly extreme content that grabs your attention in a thumbnail, a title, or a five-second preview.

Profit-fuelled motivation to capitalise on these algorithms and our attention has created a dramatic increase in violent pornography in the past 25 years. A 2025 Montreal study found the rate of visible aggression in porn had nearly tripled since 2000. This study noted that spanking, choking and being hit in the face or other body parts were increasingly prevalent.

When young boys are served these violent videos as their introduction to sex, it’s no wonder that a survey of more than 4700 Australians aged 18 to 35 found that 61 per cent of the women had been strangled during sex. That figure accounts for both consensual and non-consensual instances. Still, it is concerning given that strangulation or suffocation accounts for 12 per cent of intimate-partner violence in which women were killed.

What modern porn doesn’t often show are the open conversations before sex, ongoing consent, or the safe words that are practised by kink communities that do engage in such acts. It is rare to find a video on the Pornhub landing page with any of that. If this is what our most impressionable minds are consuming, it’s no surprise when they mimic it on people who aren’t suspecting it.

In January, the NSW government responded to recommendations from an inquiry into “Impacts of harmful pornography on mental, emotional and physical health” that was released last October. Most of the 17 recommendations related to education, and in response, Attorney-General Michael Daley pointed to various education-related initiatives that are commencing or already in place. However, his office did not provide me with a breakdown of which recommendations will be adopted. Some are as major as curriculum overhauls; others are as vague as mentioning compulsory professional development training for teachers about “student/child mental health”.

Arguably, the most important recommendation, and the hardest to achieve, is “that the NSW government work with the Australian government to classify and restrict sexually explicit material that includes violent and seriously injurious practices, such as choking, in the same manner as other illegal and seriously harmful online material”.

The Australian government, with the support of the states, could stand up to sites like Pornhub by regulating their algorithms (akin to how consent advocate Chanel Contos has launched the “Fix Our Feeds” campaign, asking the government to regulate social media algorithms) or by imposing stricter age verification.

Pornhub’s departure from France last year after new age-verification laws, and a growing international campaign to ban it on X after its AI image-based abuse controversy, show that change is possible.

Daley says he is “supportive of interjurisdictional collaboration to address the issues raised by these recommendations”. So now, we wait. We have the opportunity to set an international example. While Daley has taken the inquiry seriously, the lack of tangible new initiatives in his response is disappointing.

I’m not arguing we should stamp out porn entirely. Pornography may have existed for over 35,000 years, and will continue. Oiled-up LA pornstars will keep having orgies on harshly lit sets that look like the show home on Arrested Development. People around the world will continue to film themselves having sex for OnlyFans. But we should consider what is shown to children, and how. The NSW inquiry’s recommendations were a great starting point.

Of course, we cannot simply legislate our way out of this crisis. It takes a village. For parents, it will require uncomfortable conversations with your kids – before you might think they are ready – about what they have seen in porn, and telling them what porn so often omits: that consent is necessary and must be ongoing, whether it’s for the act of sex itself or things that happen during sexual encounters.

We have the chance to give Gen Alpha – born between 2010 and 2024, and a third of whom are at the age they are starting to watch porn – a chance for a more informed, critical relationship with pornography. We cannot accept violence as our new normal.

Isabel Cant is a social media producer for The Sydney Morning Herald.