<http://society.guardian.co.uk/drugsandalcohol/story/0,8150,1519325,00.html>

Report links crime and binge drinking

Katherine Demopoulos
Friday July 1, 2005

Nearly half of young adults are binge drinkers who are
responsible for a disproportionate number of crimes, according
to new figures from the Home Office.

The latest findings, from the 2003 Offending, Crime and Justice
survey identifies 44% of young adults aged 18 to 24 as binge
drinkers, and says this age group has the highest number of
heavy drinkers.

Warning that there is no universally agreed definition of binge
drinking, the Home Office used self-reported drunkenness to
reach its own definition. According to the Home Office, binge
drinkers are "those who drink at least once a month and reported
feeling very drunk at least once a month in the past 12 months."

Despite the ongoing media interest in excessive drinking in
young females, a higher proportion of men (49%) than women (39%)
are binge drinkers.

There are also higher levels of offending among binge drinkers,
but the researchers caution that "this is not to say that binge
drinking causes crime or that all binge drinkers take part in
criminal or disorderly behaviour."

The data shows that young adult binge drinkers account for just
6%of the adult sample, but they committed 30% of all crimes and
24% of violent offences.

Young male drinkers are more than twice as likely to commit a
violent offence as other young male regular drinkers, and 58% of
drug-dealing offences are committed by 18 to 24-year-old binge
drinkers.

Home Office spokeswoman Jane Parsons commented: "The government
recognises that alcohol-related violence is too high. Hence the
provisions in the violent crime bill."

Richard Garside, the director of the Crime and Society
Foundation at King's College London, added that while the data
was interesting, he didn't consider it "the most convincing or
robust data the Home Office has ever put out."

His initial criticism was the definition of binge drinking
itself. "It's interesting that they've chosen to pick such a
broad definition. I think on that basis most of Fleet Street
would fall into the category of binge drinking. There are
questions here of how useful that definition is."

"They haven't used the units per week consumption, which is more
useful," he said, adding, however, that people often underreport
the units they consume.

Mr Garside also believes there is a misguided tendency to
presume the link between alcohol and offence, and he stressed
that nothing is proven by the current data. "You'll pick up
people who've committed a crime, and because they've got alcohol
in their blood they put two and two together and get five. This
survey doesn't actually prove alcohol causes more crime and
disorder."

Despite the tendency to presume a link between drinking and
crime, the only offence where there is a really strong
correlation is violence - in the form of young men and the
traditional post-pub punch-up, Mr Garside said.

The link with drug dealing is not unexpected, he said, but the
alcohol is not necessarily a causal factor in the crime. "People
who are often abusing drugs will often deal them. Classically
you also might be drinking far too much. But because they've got
such a broad definition you're scooping up a whole kind of
individual and behaviours into one broad definition."

He warned: "There are very different types of behaviours, which
are often driven by very different things. Whether that means
it's the alcohol that's driving them is a very different thing."