Study by World Health Organization shows more than half of children in Britain had drunk alcohol by age 13

Archived version: https://archive.ph/mtJSB

  • Zagorath
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    7 months ago

    The study seems to be about first time having alcohol, but the reporting is equating this with alcohol abuse. I don’t think this is very good reporting at all. Your parents letting you have half a glass of champagne at a cousin’s wedding would seem to count here, but is a wildly different experience to the one implied by this reporting.

    I absolutely believe the UK has a youth drinking problem, but I don’t believe this study is necessarily one the media should be pointing to to prove it.

    • Bob@feddit.nl
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      7 months ago

      Even without reading the article, you can see they’re phrasing the highest rate of people who’d drunk once by 13 as the worst rate of child alcohol consumption. A lot of that consumption would’ve been legal and nothing untoward.

      • Zagorath
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        7 months ago

        Even without reading the article

        To be honest I thought the same, but I wanted to verify that the summary wasn’t simply misleading, which is why I went in and read the article in greater depth before commenting. Maybe the article itself had more to say. But nope, that’s really all there is to it.

        • Bob@feddit.nl
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          7 months ago

          Well, you have a strain of intellectual honesty and patience that I was lacking in that fateful day.

    • livus@kbin.social
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      7 months ago

      The reportage here may not be doing the study justice. They most likely used other metrics.

      I notice the BBC on same subject talks about children actually being drunk and about “last 30 days” both of which are better proxies.