‘Rough sex’ doesn’t kill women, their abusers do. My new research revealing the realities of so-called ‘sex games gone wrong’
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Today, my research on women killed in so-called ‘sex games gone wrong’ was published in the international, peer-reviewed journal Violence Against Women. In my study, I analysed data relating to 43 women killed in Britain between 2000 and 2018 in cases where perpetrators had been convicted of murder, manslaughter or culpable homicide.
The impetus for the research was the Natalie Connolly case. Natalie was killed by her partner John Broadhurst in December 2016. Her body was found at the bottom of the stairs in the house they shared. She had received over 40 separate injuries. Natalie had been hit, kicked and the trigger end of a bottle of carpet cleaner had been inserted into her vagina. This caused severe lacerations which resulted in arterial and venous haemorrhage. Broadhurst claimed that this was a sex game gone wrong. He argued that the couple regularly engaged in sado-masochistic sex and that she had consented to the acts that preceded her death. Broadhurst’s guilty plea to manslaughter was accepted by the Court and he received a custodial sentence of three years and eight months. The outcome in the case evoked widespread condemnation from members of the public, victim advocates and campaigners. Despite complaints under the Unduly Lenient Sentence scheme, Broadhurst’s conviction was upheld. He later appealed unsuccessfully against his conviction.
Having read about Natalie’s case, I went off in search of studies about so-called ‘sex games gone wrong’ and was surprised to find a significant gap in the literature. No academic research had analysed these cases collectively. There was nothing identifying key sociodemographic characteristics of victims or perpetrators – ages, relationships, occupations. Nothing examining what the homicides looked like - how victims died, where they took place. Nothing investigating criminal justice outcomes – what perpetrators were convicted of, how long (or short) their sentences were. I decided to make a start on plugging this gap.
I decided to look at cases which had resulted in a conviction given that there is considerably more detail about such cases in the public domain than in prosecutions without a conviction. In addition, such cases enabled me to explore instances where claims of a ‘sex game gone wrong’ had not stood up in Court. These were the cases where perpetrators hadn’t managed to convince juries that these women’s deaths were the accidents they made them out to be – and as such, we might learn something these cases in terms of the red flags to look out for.
I began my search for cases on the website We Can’t Consent to This, which documents the stories of women killed in so-called sex games gone wrong and is the first and only comprehensive repository of UK cases. The campaign group who run the website also kindly shared with me their spreadsheet of cases. I noted down cases in which there had been a conviction then conducted my own search for additional cases and more information using the Nexis news database and the Lexis legal database. I then set up a spreadsheet to enter information about each case: victim and offender ages and occupations; nature of victim-perpetrator relationship; homicide location and method; perpetrator criminal record and history of violence against women; type of conviction and length of sentence. I imported this spreadsheet into the IBM Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS) programme, generated frequency tables and applied the chi-square test to establish which of my findings were statistically significant.
Several interesting things emerged from the cases of the 43 women I found.
There was a marked difference in victim and perpetrator age. The perpetrators were, on average, significantly older than the victims. The average age difference was 5.7 years. The age difference for couples marrying for the first time in England and Wales is 1.9 years (ONS, 2019). The most common age combination was perpetrators aged 35-44 with victims aged 25-34. The perpetrator’s home was the most common location for the homicides, which applied in just under half of cases. Just under one-quarter took place in a home shared by the victim and perpetrator.
This set my alarm bells ringing as a researcher working in the field of domestic abuse. Homicides in which women are killed by men have distinctive characteristics. These homicides are preceded by a long history of coercive, controlling and abusive behaviour in which the perpetrator slowly chips away at the victim’s personhood and identity until everything she is, she is ‘for’ him (Stark, 2007: 262).
Many things can form the basis of power. Seniority in age – as noted above in my sample - is one example. That there was an over-representation of victims falling into the ‘Caring, leisure and other service occupations’ group - for example classroom assistants and care workers – was no coincidence either. The values and traits associated with such occupations – empathy, care for the well-being of others – and the relatively low pay in these jobs – are precisely the kind of characteristics that abusers looks for in victims. These factors become vulnerabilities in the eyes of an abuser looking to ingratiate himself with a victim.
The nature of these homicides was significant. Six in ten victims were killed by strangulation. Two in ten were killed with a blunt instrument. The remaining victims died by asphyxiation or a sharp instrument. Given that most common homicide method is a knife or a sharp instrument (ONS, 2020) these women’s deaths stood out as particularly unusual in this regard. Strangulation is an act we see a lot among perpetrators with misogynistic and patriarchal value systems. It’s is a way of saying ‘You are mine. I could kill you if I wanted to’. Women whose partners strangle them have an increased risk of later being killed by that man (Glass et al, 2008; Edwards, 2015).
Homicides in which women are killed by men don’t happen ‘out of the blue’ and the cases I examined were no exception. Nearly six in ten perpetrators had previous criminal convictions for violence. Nearly two-thirds had previous criminal convictions for property offences. Over half had a history of abusing women. In three-quarters of cases, the perpetrator had abused or stalked the victim. These men did not become killers overnight. Their behaviour formed part of longstanding patterns of harmful, abusive and criminal conduct towards others in general – and women in particular.
The cases I discovered did not neatly fit into the intimate partner relationship that I’m so used to writing about. This link between victims and perpetrators only accounted for around four in ten cases. Other types of relationship were ‘just met’, ‘first date’, ‘ex-partner’, ‘friend’, ‘acquaintance’ and ‘client’ (where the perpetrator had accessed the victim through sex work). The normalization and mainstreaming of ‘rough sex’ in popular culture through films like Fifty Shades of Gray, and the way in which porn and women’s magazines present acts like strangulation as ‘play’ have created a culturally approved script for perpetrators of violence against women – regardless of whether or not they have an established relationship with a victim. Indeed, over half of the perpetrators in my sample claimed that the victim initiated the specific ‘rough sex’ act that led to her death. As such, abusers are using women’s sexual liberation to explain and justify their violence to those they have silenced.
Interestingly, there was an over-representation of unemployed perpetrators. It could be that men from higher socioeconomic groups are simply not killing their partners and claiming they died in ‘sex games gone wrong’. Alternatively, it could be that they are – and they’re getting away with it. Maybe they’re not even arrested. Maybe they convince the police it was an accident. Maybe the Crown Prosecution Service don’t think there is sufficient evidence to secure a conviction. Maybe a postmortem misses something. Perhaps the perpetrators in my sample weren’t as able to construct a convincing narrative around a ‘sex game gone wrong’. Or they couldn’t afford to employ expensive lawyers to do it for them. Worryingly, manslaughter convictions appeared to be concentrated in the most recent time period covered by the research – 2015-2018. Perhaps the ‘sex game gone wrong’ is gaining traction and juries are believing perpetrators claims of unfortunate accidents in otherwise ‘normal’ relationships. Indeed, only last month, the killer of 41-year-old Claire Parry was convicted not of murder but of manslaughter. Whilst not an alleged ‘sex game gone wrong’ case, he had claimed his arms had accidentally slipped around her neck, which I consider to be absolute nonsense. In my experience, men who value and respect women do not accidentally kill them.
When it came to sentencing, men convicted of murdering their partners received shorter sentences on average than men convicted of killing women with whom they did not have a partner relationship. The average sentence length for men who murdered their female partner was 15.7 years. This compared to an average of 19.2 years where the victim was an ex-partner, 22 years when she was a friend and 27.3 years in cases where the perpetrator and victim had just met. The ‘sex game gone wrong’ appears to be most effective in securing a more favourable sentencing outcome when it is set against the backdrop of an intimate partner relationship. Women killed by men they have or had an intimate relationship with are accorded a culpability that those killed by strangers are not. The neoliberal tendency to blame victims for their own victimization through their ‘failure’ to protect themselves from harm and the ignorant assumption that domestic abuse victims can ‘just leave’ screams out in these cases.
The ‘sex game gone wrong’ would appear to be something new. It isn’t. It’s a new disguise for age-old misogyny. These deaths are not accidents. They are the outcome of patriarchal belief systems that position women as subordinate, and imbue perpetrators with a sense of entitlement to treat women as property. The neoliberal context creates the perfect conditions in which women’s liberation and formal equality are used to justify and explain violence against them. And they aren’t able to correct the narrative. Because in killing them, the perpetrators have silenced them.
The term ‘game’ implies rules, fairness, transparency and a level playing field. The so called ‘sex game gone wrong’ is anything but. We must continue to challenge the use of this defence and the cultural and social context in which it has been allowed to thrive.
References
Edwards, S. S. M. (2015). The strangulation of female partners, Criminal Law Review, 12, 949-966.
Glass, N., Laughon, K., Campbell, J., Block, C. R., Hanson, G., Sharps, P. W., & Taliaferro, E. (2008). Non-fatal strangulation is an important risk factor for homicide of women. The Journal of Emergency Medicine, 35(3), 329–335. doi: 10.1016/j.jemermed.2007.02.065
Office for National Statistics (2020). Homicide in England and Wales: year ending March 2019 - appendix tables. Retrieved from https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/crimeandjustice/datasets/appendixtableshomicideinenglandandwales accessed 2 November 2019
Stark, E. (2007). Coercive Control: How men entrap women in personal life, Oxford, United Kingdom: Oxford University Press.
