Rates of Injury and Healthcare Utilization for Kink-Identified Patients

R. A. Sprott (California State University, East Bay), A. Randall (The Alternative Sexualities Health Research Alliance, San Francisco), K. Smith and L. Woo published this study in The Journal of Sexual Medicine (volume 18, issue 10, October 2021, pages 1721–1734).

The authors note that kink-involved people take part in activities such as bondage, rough sex and fetish play that can carry a risk of injury, and that nobody had yet measured how often such injuries happen or how these people use healthcare. They ran a survey with a convenience sample of 1,398 kink-involved or kink-identified respondents and present it as the first study to report injury rates and disclosure to clinicians from a large community sample.

According to their results, 13.5 percent of respondents had at some point been injured during kink activities. More than half (58.3 percent) had not told their physical-health clinician about their kink involvement, about half (49.6 percent) had not told their mental-health clinician, and 19 percent had delayed or avoided care because they expected or perceived stigma.

The authors read these patterns through the minority stress model and argue that kink-identified people should be treated as a sexual minority in healthcare, and that clinicians need to remove barriers to culturally competent care. They name the convenience sample and self-report design as limits on how far the figures can be generalized. The abstract reports kink activities as a whole and does not give a separate rate for rope bondage.