Porn showing choking could be made illegal in NI

Pornography showing strangulation or suffocation is to be made illegal in Northern Ireland under plans by Stormont's justice minister.

Naomi Long said she will seek Northern Ireland Assembly approval to adopt legislation on the issue which is currently passing through Westminster.

The government plans followed a review that found depictions of choking were "rife" on mainstream pornography sites.

Long warned that if the issue was not addressed, "we are going to see an epidemic of this kind of behaviour - and it is putting young people's lives at risk".

Both the possession and publication of such material will be a criminal offence, under amendments to the Crime and Policing Bill currently progressing through Parliament.

Speaking at Stormont on Tuesday, Long said: "I've been engaging with the UK government and intend, subject to the agreement of members of this house, to extend this provision to Northern Ireland to ensure that similar protections are afforded here."

Joanne Barnes, from Nexus, an organisation which supports people impacted by sexual abuse and abusive relationships said Baroness Bertin's review in England in Wales found that it "normalises strangulation in consensual sex, which is not the case, and is highly profiled in most pornography and mainstream pornography and so it is highly accessible to young people".

"What we don't want to confuse is consensual sex with abusive behaviour," she told BBC Good Morning Ulster.

"That's the danger - our worry is for our young people that what might be perceived as normalised might put pressure on them to consent to activity that maybe someone is not comfortable with. So we have to think about the person's agency to make that decision without feeling pressure to do so because of a power imbalance."

She said that some "43% of females who die by homicide had experienced non-fatal strangulation in a prior experience".

She there were question around what consequences there would be in place for filmmakers that produce this material and make it accessible.

"Will it be fines, or restrictions on their future work? Where these things hurt are in their pocket," she added.

The Alliance Party minister said current legislation already criminalises extreme pornographic images portraying acts which threaten a person's life.

But she told the assembly a review commissioned by the previous UK government raised concerns that images of non-fatal strangulation or suffocation "may not be caught by the offence".

"Worryingly the review also highlighted that strangulation and suffocation pornographic content is rife on mainstream platforms," she added.

"The provision proposed in the Crime and Policing Bill implements the recommendations of that review, that depictions of non-fatal strangulation and suffocation should be clearly and explicitly captured in illegal pornography offences."

Non-fatal strangulation and suffocation are already illegal across the UK including in Northern Ireland.

But the minister said its "depiction in pornography normalises this behaviour" and the review found it was "having a malign influence on men and boys' perception of its real-world impact".

Long warned how the previous study had found a "significant number of young women around the age of 14 had already been subject to suffocation and strangulation".

"So if we don't get to grips with this now, we are going to see an epidemic of this kind of behaviour - and it is putting young people's lives at risk."