From the Home Office’s monthly email:

This week [National Tackling Drugs Week] aims to increase public confidence in, and awareness of, the work being done locally to tackle drugs issues. It is a national platform on which local agencies can publicise the wide range of activity being carried out in communities across the country; activity which includes prevention, education, treatment and robust enforcement, including a programme of regional drugs ‘action days’ and a National Cocaine Summit on 20 May plus a photographic exhibition in Trafalgar Square on the 21 May which shows the impact of cocaine production in Colombia.

The Association of Chief Police Officers (ACPO) is actively supporting the week (Supt Stuart Lander of Devon and Cornwall police is the designated operational lead.)

For further information, contact: Daniel Walpole or Louise Graham

Lots of coverage of the new figures around teenage violent crime today, much of it focused on the increase in the number of girls involved and linking this to their drinking patterns.

Daily Mail

Teenage girls are responsible for more than 40 violent attacks every day, it emerged yesterday.

The so-called ladettes, many of whom have been drinking, were responsible for 15,762 assaults and serious beatings last year, as well as more than 1,000 muggings.

The Independent

Surely drink plays a part?

There is ample evidence in town and city centres at weekends of the phenomenon of “ladettes”, groups of teenage girls and young women who become as drunk and unruly as their male contemporaries. Recent police figures suggested that 50 per cent more women were arrested in 2007-08 for being drunk and disorderly than five years ago. In the West Midlands, the number went up from just 59 to 731.

Meanwhile, as many as 29 per cent of schoolgirls admit to binge-drinking, a higher figure than schoolboys. Given the link between extreme alcohol consumption and violence, it is inevitable that more girls are finding themselves with a criminal record. David Davis, the shadow Home Secretary, said the levels of offending were a “shocking indictment” of the Government’s failure to get a grip on crime. He said new licensing laws, and policies which have “driven family breakdown”, had contributed to the problem.

Daily Star:

In figures previously leaked last week, the report also showed the number of crimes committed by girls has risen by a quarter in three years - possibly linked with alcohol.

Girls committed 59,236 crimes in 2006/07, up 25% from 47,358 in 2003/04.

Mirror:

Crimes by girls have leapt 25 per cent in three years fuelled by rising alcohol abuse.

In the same period, overall violent crime by young people rocketed nearly 40 per cent.

The Guardian’s take is more nuanced:

The most common crimes committed by girls were theft, violent attacks, criminal damage and public order offences.

The reasons behind this trend are being investigated the government and academics.

Preliminary research, conducted by London’s South Bank University, suggested a number of contributing factors.

One reason might simply be that the overall population of girls has increased and therefore the number of crimes committed by this population could be expected to rise proportionally….

Underage drinking could also be a factor, she added. When the research team interviewed a sample group of girls who had committed a crime, there was a statistically significant link between committing a violent offence and the recent use of alcohol.

The authors of the Nudge blog ask:

Why do bars serve peanuts and pretzels? It is because they are cheap? No. It is because they are salty, and salty foods make you thirsty. (Read the abstract of a paper about women, salty food, and alcohol here.) At the University of Chicago there is a twist on this relationship between brackish finger food and alcohol. Student groups that want to hold events that serve alcohol must agree to guidelines that include the following restriction: “Adequate quantities of non-salty food must be served.”

I wonder if the NUS and their affiliated unions have any similar policies?

Children & Young People Now:

Under-18s are buying materials such as alcohol, porn and violent videogames online, according to a survey of 1,000 13- to 17-year-olds by technology firm GB Group.

Turns out the GB Group have an interest in this as an “identity management company”. They say:

One in 20 (5%) 14 year olds have successfully purchased alcohol online.

Parentline Plus have a report that’s worth a look, Risky Behaviour and Setting Boundaries, which is the result of a survey and a number of focus groups with both parents and young people.  Issues around drugs and alcohol were very present amongst those taking part in the online survey:

The top three concerns of the parents who responded to our survey are drinking, drug taking and the influence of friends including fears about social networking on the internet. Almost all the respondents, 89%, said that they found it difficult to negotiate boundaries with their children and offered a variety of reasons as to why this is the case.

However, this wasn’t replicated in the focus groups where parents felt they weren’t as concerned about these issues.  However, this is qualified:

That said, a few realised too late that they had been ignorant of what their children had been getting into. The biggest area of concern for these parents was drugs, regarded as a black and white subject and a real danger.

Where parents were talking about drugs and alcohol the report says:

many also used topical news events to give their children the messages they wanted to get across such as the dangers of drugs or early sex.

“I show my son articles… and tell him it’ll kill his Nan.”

The other thing that parents wanted their children to understand was the consequences of their actions, and this was also where concrete examples helped which was a tactic they felt was being taken by schools (e.g. the Leah Betts story).

There’s a sense that illegal drugs are such a significant concern to parents that it is the one area where they aren’t waiting to find out more:

These parents wanted to keep things private and said that they only actively sought information when they hit a problem, and even then, not all problems were thought to lend themselves to advice. Drugs were probably the main exception to this, where parents were often mobilised into learning as much as possible. The internet was generally the main place parents felt they would go, apart from seeking advice from family or friends, otherwise, leaflets or other forms of literature were thought to be helpful. These parents did not seek professional advice.

In talking to young people Parentline Plus found that modelling was a very important factor in how the young people percieved drug use:

As parents believed, boundaries appeared to have been set not just by what they said, but also what they did. This had implications for smoking and drug taking.

“If your parents smoke, you’re more exposed to it. It sends you a set of signals. I smoked my first joint with my mum…”

Parentline Plus recommend:

Programmes that offer parents ‘how to talk about sex’ today and ‘how to talk about drugs’ tomorrow, can only ever have a piecemeal, short-term impact, even if parents attend them. Not only do parents need help earlier on to develop open communication with their younger children but, as the children get older and difficulties arise, parents need support about the ways they experience these difficulties, not simply about topics that concern the state.

The Campaign Company Blog tells us about how they’ve been engaging with parents:

If you give parents the right information AND you engage them in conversation about the issue then they WILL consent to their daughters having the vaccine. The only circumstances they would refuse would be if there were any doubts about the side-effects. So that’s the way forward - reassure and engage parents in the right way. If we use this approach, 400 lives a year will be saved.

Inspire Magazine:

Drug education charity Hope UK will launch its strategy to reach 500,000 children and young people each year by the end of 2011. This target will be achieved by recruiting another 800 voluntary Drug Educators to join the 206 already in Hope UK’s Programme.

At a workshop during the Health in School conference yesterday we got to hear first hand the research that led to a small spate of stories earlier this week.

Andrew Bengry-Howell talked about the views that the 18-25 year olds he and his fellow researchers have been talking to have about alcohol and intoxication.

I’m going to try to get a full set of the slides as they were packed with lots of qualitative information that I suspect will be of interest to readers.

However, the main themes that I took from Andrew’s presentation were that current industry advertising messages work remarkably well, going with the grain of young people’s aspirations; enjoying their leisure time, socialising and adventure. Whereas our current public health messages are failing to impress themselves on their target audience.

The sociological argument was that the alcohol industry have responded to and adapted the biggest cultural challenge they faced in recent times - the emergence of rave culture. They did this by developing marketing and products which mimicked the perceived benefits of the drugs most associated with raves. And as a result alcohol has retained (and arguably enhanced) its dominant position as the drug of choice for young people.

Culturally, Andrew talked about young people drinking to get drunk has become a norm for many young people. He quoted one young woman, Helen, saying:

I don’t drink it for the taste I drink it to get drunk

He said that young people now differentiate between different states of intoxication, and plan how they can mitigate some of the social risks they associate with alcohol, while ignoring the health impacts.

He spoke about how for the groups they spoke to even hospitalisation could be rationalised into a positive, heroic and comic tale of adventure.

This seems to be reinforced by the role of the group in normalising the message that intoxication = fun.

His critique of the current approach to public health advertising was that by focusing on individual drinkers it fails to appreciate the role of the group, which gives permission for (and encourages) extreme drunkenness. He also said that the message of responsible drinking is falling on deaf ears, largely because they are much more attuned to the messages of belonging and fun that the industry send out.

I don’t know how much is new in what is being described, or how much of it is mirrored in the attitudes and aspirations of those under 18, but there’s certainly a challenge to those seeking to work with young people to change their perception of this most popular of drugs.

In discussion practitioners spoke about using normative messages, resistance skills, ensuring that sex and relationships education and drug education were combined, and working more closely with parents as some of the tactics that were being employed with school aged young people. Andrew Bengry-Howell said that he also thought there was a role for schools in helping young people to better understand how advertising works and how to resist its pressures.