"He was on top of me - we were kissing and having sex, then suddenly he put his forearm on my neck and pressed hard with his full weight. I just froze."
Rachel* had never slept with the man before. Speaking to the BBC, she says while the sex was consensual, the man began choking her without warning and without her consent - and that was deeply frightening.
"He just did it like it was normal and it caught me by surprise, so I just went with it," the 26-year-old says. "I didn't lose consciousness, but this numbness came over me and I just waited for it to stop."
It happened again a fortnight later, Rachel says, with another man whom she had met on a dating site. Like the previous occasion, there was no discussion about choking beforehand.
"The actual strangling is a blank in my memory," she says. "His hands were round my neck, and then I disassociated with it until it ended.
"You go from feeling safe to losing control of the situation. I didn't have sex for a year afterwards because of how it made me feel alienated from my body."
Both incidents were distressing for Rachel, who assumes the men who choked her must have seen it in pornography.
"It felt like it was - in their minds - just a normal part of sex."
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