Warning: This article contains graphic descriptions of violence

There is a headline you may have seen more than once on the cover of trashy magazines and tabloid articles in an attempt to garner your fleeting interest: ‘sex game gone wrong’.

Now the phrase has jumped from the clickbait rhetoric of the internet straight into the defence arguments of the British courtroom.

Fifty-seven women in the UK have been killed by 57 men who used the ‘sex game gone wrong’ ‘excuse’ as part of their defence. While 38 were charged with murder, 19 of these men escaped a murder charge. Five weren’t charged with anything at all.

Femicide is being reduced to a ‘game’ in courtrooms across the UK, and men are getting away with murder. Finally, hopefully, people are taking notice – The Guardian’s recent article on the rise of choking during sex was a good start.

Last year 21 year old Laura Huteson was killed by Jason Gaskell, a man she had met earlier that day. A man who cut her jugular vein and carotid artery with a knife while having sex with her.

A man who had a history of choking partners and holding a knife against their throats during intercourse. A man who kept a knife under his pillow for this very purpose. A man who had strangled another woman 11 days before Laura’s death.

A man who got six years for manslaughter.

Presumably the fact that Gaskell had a history of violent sexual behaviour with other women he hadn’t killed strengthened the notion that Laura’s death was an accident – that he was so good at holding a knife to women’s throats and so skilled in choking partners without killing them, that this simply had to have been a game that had ‘gone wrong’.

A game that, as the judge stated, Laura must’ve been a willing participant in.

It’s as if men are being forgiven and praised for owning up to their non-conventional sexual preferences, while dead women are discredited for the same thing.

Judge Richardson said ‘there was no suggestion the sex had been non-consensual’. Despite the pool of blood, and the dead body, and the fact that Gaskell was literally holding a knife to her neck as it happened.

Part of the reason defence lawyers use the ‘sex game gone wrong’ narrative is in an attempt to discredit and dehumanise the deceased. This is victim blaming at its most abhorrent. Sexually adventurous women will have that trait used to destroy their character, whereas men will have their right to sexual adventure defended in court.

Mandy Westhill was killed in 2000. She had suffered injuries to her face, neck, external lacerations to her genitals. She died of severe rectal injuries and asphyxia.

The defence lawyer for the man who killed her said that the events leading to Ms Westhill’s death was sex that ‘narrow-minded people would call kinky’. Her bowel was perforated through her anus.

The women are ‘asking for it’, but if you challenge the man on his behaviour, you’re a prude. Men are being forgiven and praised for owning up to their non-conventional sexual preferences, while dead women are discredited for exactly the same thing. If only they hadn’t been so foolish as to die.

The double standards and entrenched sexism within our judicial system are clear.

In the last five years, the ‘sex game gone wrong’ defence was successful in six of the 14 killings of a woman that reached trial, with the man being found either not guilty or receiving a manslaughter conviction.

It’s almost as if the justice system is suggesting that if women consent to sex, then they consent to the consequences of sex, even if that results in death.

And these are just the cases of violent sexual activity that have resulted in death. What about the rest?

As a society we seem to have a better understanding of consent and sexual touching (although there is vast room for improvement) but men have a lot to learn about introducing less-conventional foreplay into the bedroom. Doing it without warning or consent is not an introduction – it’s assault.

I know so many women who have been unexpectedly hit in the face and strangled during sex by otherwise seemingly caring partners. Some men are yet to learn that ‘no’ means ‘no’ but it’s still the ‘good guys’ who presume that if you haven’t said ‘no’ it means ‘carry on until I tell you to stop’.

How exactly is a girl supposed to tell you to stop if you have your hands around her neck and are cutting off her oxygen supply?

When a person engages in sexual activity, it doesn’t mean they therefore consent to ALL sexual contact, or any other physical activity that their partner may associate with sex.

I’m not here to kink-shame or judge sexual preferences, but anything that could potentially result in the harm of another human being should not be done unless they are anything but 100 per cent enthusiastic in their attitude towards it.

Respect and communication are key. We need to teach men and boys that consent is not limited to sex and that consent should be present at every single stage of physical intimacy.

Checking in with your partner is vital for a healthy sexual relationship – they may no longer be into the thing that they were into when you first met. Or they may have never been into it in the first place.

I hear an overwhelming number of stories about people who did something in bed with their partner that neither of them actually liked, they just assumed the other person expected it of them and never thought to ask.

Men: if this is something you really want to do, ask yourself why. Think about the external and internalised misogyny at play here. Are you OK with it?  Do you actually like it or is it something you copied from a porno you saw that time and it ended up in your ‘routine’?

And women: choking is not a normal part of sex. It is not expected of you, and anyone who makes you feel otherwise needs to get in the bin. One woman dies every two weeks in the UK from being strangled by her partner. There are no cases of a woman having killed a man in a ‘sex game gone wrong’.

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