Drunk Britons Are Beating Each Other Up Less and Less

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

Good news, Great Britain: the chance of being jumped while waiting for a taxi late at night or having your teeth smashed in by a piss drunk dickhead in a blazer has fallen to a 15-year low. The reason? According to the Cardiff University researchers who conducted the study into violence-related injuries, it all has to do with a nationwide fall in binge drinking.

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In England and Wales, 211,000 patients were victims of violence in 2014, showing a decline of 10 percent on the previous year. This marked the lowest figure since the annual survey of 117 hospitals began in 2001. Researchers say alcohol was involved in around 70 percent of the hospital cases, so it’s apparent there’s a pretty clear link between the bottle and a bottling.

This decrease in violence is great news for casualty wards and concerned mothers, but what does the decline in drinking far too much in a short amount of time mean for us as a nation? Are we really leaving behind something that—for better or worse—many consider to be a deep-rooted facet of Britain’s modern identity?

According to Professor Jonathan Shepherd, lead author of the study, the reason binge drinking has declined is simply because people can’t afford to get so wasted anymore. During the recession, the price of alcohol has risen while people’s disposable income has diminished. However, he warned that binge-drinking and the violence that often follows could increase if the upswing in the nation’s economic fortunes combines with a continuation of austerity measures affecting police and on-street CCTV.

“Since 2010, we have identified a decline of over 30 percent in people needing treatment in emergency departments after violence. And yet it isn’t all good news; our findings suggest that the issue of alcohol-related violence endures, with violence-related emergency department attendance consistently at its highest levels on weekends,” he said.

“As we emerge from the economic downturn we must ensure that the affordability of alcohol does not increase. Over 200,000 people across England and Wales going to emergency departments with injuries caused by violence are still far too many.”

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It’s not just about emergency rooms overrun by patients with alcohol-related injuries; a study released at the end of last month estimated frontline costs of binge drinking to the tax payer to be £4.9 billion [$7.4 billion] a year. The research, conducted by teams from the universities of Essex and Bath, found that, per day, binge drinking increases emergency room admissions by 8 percent, road accidents by 17 percent, on-duty police officers by 30 percent and overall arrests by 45 percent.

Professor Marco Francesconi, who worked on the study, was at pains to highlight that this £4.9 billion figure didn’t even reflect the total nationwide cost of drinking large amounts of alcohol all at once.

He said: “Our calculations suggest a cost of £4.9 billion per year. This is large when compared to the government’s spending on some welfare programs. For instance, it corresponds to 23 percent of the expenditures on housing benefit. Furthermore, our estimate does not include costs associated with absenteeism, lost employment, reduced productivity, and long-term health problems.”

In light of this, the apparent fall in binge drinking can only be welcomed. However, there are concerns that there’s not really been a fall at all; that people are still drinking just as much, but in private rather than at the pub.

Dr. Adam Winstock of the Global Drug Survey—and the man behind OneTooMany.co, a service that compiles user-generated responses as to what defines an excessive amount of drinking—thinks people are maybe just having more house parties. He also made clear that he doesn’t think there’s an increase in young people turning to legal highs or drugs because of the cost of alcohol.

“As booze gets more expensive it’s quite possible that people are drinking more and more in their own homes. Therefore they’re not in public areas where they’re more likely to get arrested or get into fights with other big groups,” he explained. “Alcohol remains the cheapest and most dangerous way to get off your face in the UK. If you’ve got three 15-year-olds with $15 between them, they can still get six liters of cheap cider. About 1 percent of drinkers turn up to A&E each year. It’s not that unusual. The chances of a higher risk young person ending up in hospital at some point from drinking—I’d say it was probably one in five.”

One percent might sound small, but it’s a massive amount when you consider how many drinkers there are in the UK. Binge drinking is ingrained into our national character, but what’s made it so wildly popular? This was the question Dutch psychologist Anna van Wersch set out to answer.

“We found the social aspect to drinking alcohol reflected again and again, with all the participants saying they were in company the last time they got drunk, and several saying drinking alone was ‘pointless.’ Getting drunk was about sharing happy feelings with others and being sociable,” said Professor van Wersch, who admits to being taken aback by British drinking habits when she first moved to England from Holland 17 years ago.

Despite a small sample group of 32, the psychologist’s findings on people rewarding themselves after a hard working week ring true. Participants in the project were invited to discuss positive notions of binge drinking as well as negative. Being confident, relaxed, and lacking inhibitions were listed as the main positives. Hangovers, getting too intimate or pushy and making a fool of yourself were the main negatives. Surprisingly, not one person mentioned the long-term health implications of drinking too much, or its role in facilitating antisocial behavior.

Van Wersch also highlighted the constraints and cultural norms of British alcohol consumption, such as the need for a “big night out,” or abstinence during the week justifying binging at weekends—trends not replicated in other European countries.

“There’s a lot of pressure to do well and to behave appropriately and control one’s emotions, and that can be stressful. That’s why I think the British put so much emphasis in having something to look forward to at the weekend,” she said. “Drinking is so embedded in the culture here. Everyone from a young age is integrated into this culture. And if people didn’t have the ‘big night out’ with their friends to look forward to, what would they do and feel like at the end of the week? We don’t want a nation on Prozac, do we?”

Van Wersch was verbalizing what many binge drinkers in the UK feel. Pricing, policing, and stricter licensing terms have all demonstrated themselves to be useful tools for helping to curb the worst public excesses of alcohol consumption. However, people who binge drink clearly find benefit in what they do most of the time, and without extreme and unpopular measures they’re not going to radically change their habits.

To help binge drinkers maintain enough self-control to mitigate alcohol’s most destructive aspects—both for themselves and others—Dr. Winstock believes more needs to be done to change the conversation. He says there is growing evidence that this is happening: for instance, getting paralytic is increasingly socially unacceptable. People are learning to temper themselves after being involved in—or witnessing—a serious incident involving alcohol, likely one of the reasons there are less hospital cases now. However, there is still a lot of difficult ground to cover.

“The drinking guidelines displayed on bottles are based on really good evidence that, above those limits, you are starting to do yourself harm. Most people in the UK know what they are, but only 20 percent take any notice,” he said.

“Why don’t people pay any attention to it? Because three units a day for a bloke is not going to get him where he wants to be. Guidelines don’t acknowledge the reasons people drink. We’re a long way from having a conversation about getting the feeling you want from alcohol without doing too much damage.”

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