Shibari: Double Hanging During Consensual Sexual Asphyxia
A 2013 forensic and psychiatric case report from Sapienza University of Rome on a fatal double hanging that the authors called shibari; a 2015 published response disputed its framing of BDSM.
This case report by P. Roma, F. Pazzelli, M. Pompili, P. Girardi and S. Ferracuti of the NESMOS department at Sapienza University of Rome appeared in Archives of Sexual Behavior (volume 42, issue 5, July 2013, pages 895–900; online November 2012).
The authors describe an incident in which two women were tied together by rope in a way that also involved their necks, and one of them died. Alongside the autopsy results, the paper reports a psychiatric evaluation and psychological testing of the woman who survived. In the authors’ view, the case calls into question how well participants in masochistic practices protect themselves, and whether people with psychiatric conditions should be taking part in activities they regard as extremely risky. They suggest that more case studies of living participants would help clinicians understand and treat the practice.
The title pairs the word shibari with consensual sexual asphyxia, and the article is a forensic case study rather than a study of rope practice. In 2015 the same journal published a response by Ellen M. Lee, Kathryn R. Klement and Brad J. Sagarin. A 2022 forensic review by Schori and colleagues cites that response for the view that it is inaccurate to describe all BDSM activities as extremely dangerous, and it counts this case among seventeen published BDSM-related deaths, most of them from strangulation during erotic asphyxiation.