Teenage Drinking

by Kristen Dunn

Good Evening Ladies and Gentlemen. Thank you to the Lions Club for inviting me to speak to you tonight. My chosen topic is 'Teenage Drinking'.

According to statistics, teenage drinking has decreased since 1992, which is a move in the right direction, but we still have a long way to go.

Australia has some of the strictest laws in the western world regarding alcohol consumption. Yet our teenage drinking rates are one of the highest in the world. According to recent studies in America, Australian teenagers, on average, drink 3 times as much than their American counterparts. On the other hand in most European countries it is legal for 16 year olds to buy and consume beer and wine.

I have just returned from a year in Europe where the teenagers go out very frequently to bars, nightclubs and pubs. An average night out would be generally having a maximum of 3 beers and allocating a designated driver is taken very seriously.

In Australia the drinking scene is much different. Weekend backyard parties where teenagers drink excessively and purely to get drunk is seen as fairly normal.

A designated driver is not viewed as a role with responsibility, but rather a huge inconvenience to their night out.

Why are we, in Australia, experiencing so many problems with teenage drinking when America's laws are stricter than ours and European laws are more lenient yet neither of these places have as many problems as we have? Many reasons are given to explain away the problems of teenage drinking, some of which are; depression, need to escape, need to drown feelings, peer pressure or just to have a good time.

When asked by a friend at school what my topic for tonight would be I answered 'Teenage Drinking' to which he replied "that's a pretty good topic, but we all know you have more fun when you're drunk" This is the general opinion of most teenagers.

Most teenagers could stand up here, with the same knowledge that I have of the problems associated with alcohol consumption and yet most weekends they would ignore what they know and drink to excess.

By my age many Australian teenagers have drunk to the point where their body cannot cope anymore and they pass out. Although being taught throughout school years that this is a dangerous position to be in, they don't seem to realize that the next stage is not waking up at all.

Binge drinking has serious side effects on ones health. It damages the liver, the kidneys, the brain and the stomach. Apart from the health side effects, teens are getting more involved in unsafe or unwanted sex, drink driving, violence, vandalism, other drugs and just plain embarrassing themselves. By the age of 17, 95% of people have consumed alcohol but for the older generation, of those over 65 years old at this point in time, only 14% had consumed alcohol by the same age.

The increase in Drug and Alcohol related crimes has resulted in a special court process for the offenders. The Sentencing (Amendment) Act 2002 in Victoria established a Drug court as a branch of the Magistrates Court to overcome problems of crowded jails and courts. This new system looks to address the underlying problems of offenders and seeks to help them with their abuse of alcohol and drugs.

One of our well-known Australian mottos is "she'll be right, mate" I feel this attitude is often taken too far and in cases of alcohol abuse this attitude needs to change.

I was impressed by the attitudes of the teenagers in Europe, I feel that the reason European teenagers don't abuse the laws regarding alcohol consumption, as Australians do, is due to the respect they have for parental authority and the willingness of the parents or role models to stand up for what they believe and protect their children. Too many Australian parents, even after admitting that what they did regarding alcohol as teens was dangerous, let their children at ages as young as 12 years old consume alcohol excessively.

We have seen many ads on television aimed at teenage drinkers, some graphic with car accidents, others with high profile personalities and recording artists speaking out about drink driving and excessive alcohol consumption.

These ads are great but they on their own cannot hope to combat the problem. Teens hear all this at school as well. I feel we need all these things to be backed up by parents who are willing to 'step up to the mark' and become much more aware of what their children are doing. As teenagers most of us have many friends. Our parents aren't there to be our best friends, they are there as our mentors and to set boundaries and rules for us to abide by, not that we always agree with them.

As mentioned before we have taken the attitude of "she'll be right, mate" too far, we need to reassess our views on 'how far is too far?' and be willing to make life changes.

Thank you.