Abstract/Summary

Concerns about the legal landscape of BDSM are being reinvigorated today through public attention to the issue of ‘rough sex’ defences for homicide and abuse. Victim-survivors have orientated around the language of ‘rough sex’ to express concerns about practices across a variety of contexts, from established BDSM relationships to casual heterosex. As such, this paper provides victim-survivors’ everyday navigation of activities and languages around BDSM, kink and fetish. It finds the following key themes as being crucial to participants’ understandings of safe and satisfying practice: (a) communication and recognition of agentic others; (b) community learning and accountability; and (c) being playful and bounded, but not too bounded. This paper presents these as a call to understand how some ‘rough sex’ defences not only excuse or obscure abusive practices but also stigmatise and marginalise certain BDSM, kink and fetish practitioners and communities.