28/02/2023
Police Oracle
Recent declines in alcohol consumption among young people is one of a number of factors identified in new research
A fascinating new report from the Institute of Alcohol Studies (IAS) explores recent patterns in alcohol-related violence. In England and Wales, official statistics on alcohol-related violence are drawn from the Crime Survey for England and Wales (CSEW) – an annual nationally representative household survey capturing experiences of victimisation in the last year.
Across the ten years between 2009/10 and 2019/20, overall levels of alcohol-related violence have fallen – from 1,001,000 incidents in 2009/10 to 525,000 in 2019/20. What’s more, while this has happened alongside broader declines in violence as a whole, declines in alcohol-related violence have been steeper. Overall levels of violent crime peaked in 2010/11 at 2,126,000 incidents and fell to their lowest levels in 2019/20 at 1,239,000 incidents – a substantial fall by a third. Until 2013/14 alcohol-related violence generally accounted for at least half of all the violent incidents reported to the CSEW each year. In 2009/10, this proportion sat at 54%. However, in 2014/15, this proportion dropped to 42%, and has stayed generally stable since.
Of course none of this undermines the seriousness of alcohol-related violence as a policy problem (as there are still more than half a million incidents of this violence each year), the authors say that exploring this decline could point us towards violence reduction measures which could accelerate this very welcome trend.
The researchers explore a number of possible reasons for this fall in alcohol-related violence. By reviewing the research literature, the researchers discount the impact of any new criminal justice interventions, chiefly because new measures such as additional police enforcement powers against licence holders in particular and the power to give immediate fines for alcohol-related public disorder have been so inconsistently implemented.
Another issue examined is what the researchers term “securitisation”; the implementation of new technology. However, although the big increase in CCTV, the expansion in the use of breathalysers and the adoption of toughened/plastic glassware (to reduce alcohol-related injuries) may all have had a role to play, most of these were well-established prior to the decline in alcohol-related violence.
The researchers consider that a more credible factor relates to the recent declines in the alcohol consumption of young people. Young people are certainly drinking less. A review of the literature reveals that underage drinking has been “in long-term decline” in England since 2003 while the proportion of 16-24 year olds who drank fell markedly to 78% from 90% between 2001 and 2016. Importantly, those 16-24 year olds who are consuming alcohol are doing so “less often and in smaller quantities”.
The argument is certainly persuasive, a substantial proportion of alcohol-related violence happens around the night-time economy; in simple terms people get too drunk and get into fights. Of course, it is mainly young people who go out most often and it is interesting to note that declines in alcohol consumption seen to have affected heavier young drinkers to the greatest degree.
Another issue not explored by the researchers is that many young people do not go out as regularly as they did before the advent of the internet. They communicate regularly with their friends online and socialise via online gaming whereas previously they would have had to go out into public spaces where the opportunities for unsupervised alcohol consumption and potential conflict with other groups of young people were greater.
The researchers are careful to separate out crimes of domestic violence linked to alcohol, pointing out that the self-reported victimisation levels relating to domestic assaults are universally accepted by researchers as being an under-estimation of the true extent of that pernicious problem.
Readers interested in this area can read the full IAS study here.