UK launches Youth Alcohol Action Plan
Globe comment
Action to reverse the trend of binge drinking and the culture of intoxication in the UK’s Governments is long overdue. The YAAP contains a set of proposals that demonstrates the UK’s ambivalence and a lack of firm conviction to implement effective alcohol control policies. Consequently the actions proposed in the YAAP will fall short of the mark.
A plan aimed at dealing with young people and alcohol should have reaffirmed the Government’s own stated goal of creating a culture where it is socially acceptable for young people to choose not to drink, or to start drinking later – two factors that have a significant impact on preventing alcohol related harm and on promoting the immediate and long term future wellbeing of individuals.
Changing culture requires more than increasing knowledge and providing guidance, it requires the empowerment of youth and of the values encapsulated in the EuropeanYouth Forum’s Position Paper on Alcohol Related Harm (2007):
“A key aim of alcohol policy, for the European Youth Forum, is the empowerment of young people to make responsible and healthy choices when it comes to the use of alcohol. Young people often live within cultures where heavy drinking is encouraged and glamorized. In order to make responsible and healthy choices young people need to be informed, have strong self-esteem, and the possibility of alternative ways of spending their leisure time and having fun. Public policies should be geared towards supporting young people in this regard while striving for the emergence of a culture where young peoples’ right to choose not to use alcohol or use alcohol responsibly is respected.”
The Chief Medical Officer’s guidance to families will need to be sensitive to the values and beliefs of a multi-faith society where the promotion of personal abstinence on religious and moral grounds remain cherished values within many of these families. The guidance should also positively reaffirm the Ethical Principles and Goals of the European Charter on Alcohol that: “All people who do not wish to consume alcohol or who cannot do so for health or other reasons, have the right to be safeguarded from pressures to drink and to be supported in their non drinking behaviour.”
The introduction of minor adjustments to legislation that will, for example, marginally increase police powers to tackle young people’s drinking in public places,without facing the real challenge of introducing mandatory codes for the advertising and marketing of alcohol to young people will not be acceptable to many. It is the prime responsibility of Government to protect the wellbeing of the young and to use every power at its disposal to control the sale and marketing of alcohol to young people.
The European Charter on Alcohol as far back as 1995 put forward as one of its ten strategies to “Promote health by controlling the availability, for example for young people, and influencing the price of alcoholic beverages, for instance by taxation.”
The aim of current Government strategy seems to be to persuade, cajole and coerce parents into taking responsibility for their children’s drinking.
Parents may be much more willing to cooperate with the noble aim of changing attitudes to alcohol and drunkenness and of changing drinking behaviour if they were convinced that the those who have real authority to control advertising, sponsorship, price and promotion of alcohol to their children are also taking their role seriously.
The European Youth Forum’s Position Paper on Alcohol Related Harm (2007) confirms young people’s own perception that “The promotion and marketing of alcohol reinforces the current image of alcohol and is often directly or indirectly targeted towards young people. In order for young people to make informed decisions, restrictions on alcohol marketing should be put in place and enforced.”
A recent report on binge drinking in Europe (Binge Drinking and Europe. Hamm: DHS – Deutsche Hauptstelle fur Suchttragen e.V.DHS (2008)) warns that information and persuasion techniques alone will not achieve sustained behavioural change in an environment “in which many competing messages are received in the form of marketing and social norms supporting drinking, and in which alcohol is readily available.”
We welcome, as a step in the right direction, the possibility that social responsibility standards relating to the activity of the drinks and advertising industry will be made mandatory. Such action is long overdue.