British youth culture and binge drinking

Binge-drinking is regularly touted as a major threat to the well being of contemporary British society

• Understanding the modern phenomenon of binge drinking can be assisted by exploring the parallels with the 'Gin Crisis' of early-eighteenth-century England.
• Both are driven by pressure groups and an expanding media industry, focus primarily on the role of women, are urban based, and are underpinned by public perceptions of government complacency and an element of xenophobia.
• Both could be categorized as a form of 'moral panic', that is, an event constructed in the media that draws its power not primarily from its inherent features but from its capacity to mediate a package of wider social anxieties.
• But there are important differences. In addressing the problem of modern binge drinking the past should be examined in a nuanced way that avoids crude parallelism and distinguishes carefully between similarities and differences.
• The contemporary crisis is one of the relatively well-off rather than the poor, reflects the rise of a self-conscious youth culture in which women are now full participants and performers, and is fuelled by a far more complex and dynamic media.
• Close attention should be paid to the role of the media in constructing perceptions of the problem, and care taken to separate out those elements which are peripheral to it, but nonetheless fuel its intensity, and those which constitute its core, such as the potential damage to the short- and long-term health of young people.
• In framing a response, a fuller understanding of the nature of youth culture and leisure is important, as is the need to place binge drinking within the context of alcohol and drug consumption throughout society.
• Quick-fix legislative solutions that simply shunt the negative effects of binge drinking elsewhere should be avoided.

(http://www.historyandpolicy.org/papers/policy-paper-62.html)

Further reading

• Peter Borsay, A History of Leisure: the British Experience since 1500 (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2006).
• Peter Clark, ' The "Mother Gin" controversy in the early eighteenth century', Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 5th ser., 38 (1988).
• Lee Davison, 'Experiments in the social regulation of industry: gin legislation, 1729-1751', in Lee Davison, Tim Hitchcock, Tim Keirn and Robert B. Shoemaker (eds), Stilling the Grumbling Hive: the Responses to Social and Economic Problems in England, 1689-1750(Stroud: Alan Sutton, 1992).
• Patrick Dillon, The Much-lamented Death of Madam Geneva: the Eighteenth-century Gin Craze (London: Review, 2002).
• John Greenway, Drink and British Politics since 1830: a Study in Policy Making (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2003).
• Jessica Warner, Craze: Gin and Debauchery in an Age of Reason (London: Profile Books, 2003).