Getting Wasted: Why College Students Drink Too Much and Party So Hard
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In his concise summary of the efficacy of a variety of alcohol-prevention programs, Dowdall argues that many abuse-prevention programs appear to make at least some difference in student drinking behaviors. For example, some individual-level alcohol interventions have been found to reduce alcohol use and to reduce alcohol-related problems in research subjects. Individual-level interventions generally follow an experimental design through which the experimental group receives some combination of motivational interviewing techniques, alcohol education, normative comparisons, moderation strategies, and feedback on consumption and drinking-related problems.20 Programs administrators hope that students that are exposed to these interventions will demonstrate better alcohol-related knowledge than control groups and that they will modify their attitudes toward drinking and, as a result, change their drinking behaviors. Evaluation researchers have demonstrated that these approaches can result in a reduction in problem drinking behaviors in some populations. The bad news, on the other hand, is that the effects of such interventions are generally small and costly, and are least effective among the most hard-core college drinkers. Interventions, for instance, appear to work better on females than on males (a higher-risk group).21
One of the more popular drinking-reduction strategies is known as the “social norms” approach. Social-norming campaigns are based on the assumption that college students erroneously believe that their peers drink much more than they actually do. And, as a matter of fact, empirical research supports this view. College students generally believe that their peers regularly consume more alcohol than they do. That is, a student might incorrectly believe that the typical college drinker consumes over eight alcoholic beverages per drinking episode. According to the social norming perspective, this belief—that drinking large quantities of alcohol is normative—may influence students to try to match that level of consumption because “that’s what everyone does in college.” The architects of the social-norming approach employ the use of educational efforts, advertising campaigns, and informational sessions to teach college students that moderation—and not binge drinking—is actually more common among their peers. Again, studies show that the effects of these programs are less than dramatic. The effect sizes of social-norms programs appear to be small and difficult to interpret. Furthermore, programs guided by the social-norms philosophy are least effective in the heaviest-drinking schools and in institutions that are located in communities with a relatively large number of alcohol outlets.22 The song remains the same when Dowdall reviews the effectiveness of other approaches, like internet-based prevention, computer-facilitated programs, and community-group approaches. In short, programs meant to reduce alcohol use on campus have not been terribly effective thus far. In the next section, I describe harm-reduction and bystander-intervention approaches to college drinking. Based on the high level of informal social support that is already occurring in the college drinking scene, I argue that “using drunk support” may be an effective way to reduce the corollary harms related to getting wasted.
Using Drunk Support: The Policy Implications of the Already-Existing Nodes of Social Support in the College Drinking Scene
As I have suggested throughout the book, part of the reason why students continue to engage in dangerous drinking practices is the significant drunk support that they provide to one another when crises arise. But if university administrators and policymakers are willing to enlist college drinkers in the fight to reduce alcohol-related harms, drunk support could also be used to reduce risk. Can those of us who are concerned about the harms related to heavy college drinking use these informal strategies to our advantage? Can campus administrators and program facilitators use drunk support to make the drinking scene a safer place? What I am suggesting here is that drunk support can become an institutionalized form of harm reduction. Many college students are already mobilized to reduce the potential harms produced by collective intoxication. Maybe it is time to get the drinkers themselves more instrumentally involved in making college drinking a less dangerous enterprise. In short, college drinkers should be encouraged to employ harm-reduction strategies to minimize risks for themselves and for their peers.
Harm reduction describes a set of practical approaches designed for dealing with the dangers of drug and alcohol abuse. According to G. Alan Marlatt, director of the Addictive Behaviors Research Center at the University of Washington, the harm-reduction model is based upon a series of pragmatic ideals and compassionate methods that are meant to decrease the dangers associated with high-risk behaviors.23 Harm-reduction approaches have also been referred to as damage limitation, harm minimization, and casualty reduction; they are a relatively new set of public policy interventions in the United States. Harm-minimization strategies have been an important part of public health policy in Europe since the 1980s when they were used to deal with the burgeoning AIDS crisis, but the movement took a little longer to catch on in the United States. The first National Harm Reduction Conference was held in Oakland, California, in 1996 and is regarded as marking the beginning of the American harm-reduction movement.24 This school of thought assumes that a certain level of drug and alcohol abuse is inevitable in any modern social body. Furthermore, harm-reduction scholars and practitioners point out that prevention programs and campaigns against abuse—especially those that espouse abstinence—have generally failed to achieve their desired results. Harm-reduction programs inspire at-risk populations to employ behavior modification strategies that seek to reduce the harm of high-risk activities (often with abstinence as an ideal goal) while accepting that abstinence is not a realistic goal for everyone. The harm-reduction perspective recognizes that people need to develop methods to reduce the potential for harm if the use or abuse of drugs or alcohol continues. This perspective is unique in that it seeks to draw upon the personal agency of substance users. Under harm reduction, individuals are assumed to be the primary agents in lowering the harms related to their risky actions. Substance abusers are taught to develop methods to avoid severe intoxication, overdosing, nonhygienic practices, unsafe sexual behaviors, and other drug- and alcohol-related factors that enhance the risks related to drug and alcohol use.
Furthermore, harm-reduction practitioners take a nonjudgmental approach to the problem of substance abuse; rather than pathologizing drinkers and drug abusers, harm reduction specialists treat them as capable individuals who hold the keys to their own outcomes. Thus, harm-reduction approaches work to empower people rather than to scold, judge, or marginalize high-risk groups.25 The nonjudgmental dimension of the harm-reduction philosophy makes it a particularly promising approach for dealing with college drinking. As emerging adults, university students are seeking increasing freedom and autonomy. This search for independence, in fact, may indeed lead to many of the dangerous drinking practices occurring in the college drinking scene. Policies that attempt to take away their freedoms or that treat university students as reckless children, thus, may only serve to add fuel to the flames that power the drinking scene. According to a recent study on the effectiveness of harm-prevention programs in responding to university drinking,
Mandates from university officials that attempt to curtail student freedom tend to be very unpopular with the undergraduate student population. Students appear to know the “facts” about the dangers of alcohol, yet they consume alcohol anyway.… It is illegal for underage students to buy, possess or consume alcohol, yet the very high levels of student drinking indicate that the typical underage student is ready, able and willing to engage in all three of these activities.… “Bottom-up” approaches to alcohol education reflect a different viewpoint and offer an alternative to “top-down” approaches. A “bottom-up” approach involves listening to and involving students or focusing on individual students in finding solutions to problems of the student population.… Harm-prevention programs that transcend judgments about drinking behavior, and focus on the promotion of realistic intervention and avoidance strategies may ultimately provide be
tter results.26
Harm-reduction approaches may represent effective strategies for confronting college drinking because they get students “in on the act.” And one especially fruitful way to integrate college drinkers into harm-reduction strategies is through bystander-intervention training. Bystander-intervention approaches assume that the effects of harmful and risky behaviors can be buffered by the presence of motivated actors, who are willing and able to intervene under special circumstances in order to ameliorate the negative effects that inevitably arise in risky contexts. Clearly, the college drinking scene is a natural and obvious candidate for the use of bystander intervention. With college populations, bystander-intervention programs are most commonly used in response to the risks of sexual victimization on campus. As detailed throughout this book, women especially are at a heightened risk for sexual victimization when they interact with men in college drinking cultures. Bystander-intervention programs are designed to activate the members of a college community to police their own social worlds. Thus, rather than conceptualizing men as potential predators and women as would-be victims, the bystander perspective invites all the members of a university community to learn to identify the typical prerape signs of an interaction and to learn to safely and effectively intervene when intoxicated students appear to be vulnerable. According to Shawn Burn, a psychologist at California Polytechnic State University, bystander interventions may be particularly effective in preventing sexual victimization (a well-established risk factor associated with drinking) because:
bystanders can help create new community norms for intervention to prevent sexual assault, increase others’ sense of responsibility for intervening and their feelings of competence, and provide role models of helping behavior. A bystander focus creates less defensiveness because people are approached as potential allies rather than as potential victims or potential perpetrators.… An emphasis on bystanders as prevention agents also reduces the burden of sole responsibility for rape avoidance often placed on the potential victim.… Moreover, most sexual assaults are perpetrated by a small percentage of serial perpetrators… whose motivations for assault are complex and hard to change. If, however, people can learn to recognize situations in which others are at risk for sexual assault, take responsibility for intervening, and know how to intervene, then sexual assault could potentially be reduced.27
This quotation highlights one of the central foci of the bystander-intervention response to sexual victimization on campus. Specifically, potential interveners must be trained to be sensitive to the markers of sexual assault that are present in the pre-assault phase. According to the seminal bystander-intervention model developed by social psychologists John Darley and Bibb Latane, effective bystanders must first become aware of the problematic event and then they must identify the situation as one in which intervention is necessary. Next, bystanders must take responsibility for the outcome of the event, must decide upon the manner in which they are going to intervene, and, finally, must act to intervene.28 According to the data provided by my respondents, it is clear that many college students are already acutely aware of the conditions that facilitate sexual assault. To boil it down, some informants felt that women were vulnerable to victimization when they were too intoxicated to consent to sexual relations or too drunk to effectively fend off the advances of an aggressive male. When willing interveners recognized that conditions were ripe for assault, they employed the use of the cock block or activated “stepping in” strategies to defuse the risk.
According to Mary Moynihan and Victoria Banyard, research investigators at the University of New Hampshire, programs aimed at training and inspiring students to be effective bystanders can be effective.29 For example, one programmatic intervention involved a ninety-minute training session focused on campus Greeks and athletes. The program content covered basic information about the nature and forms of sexual violence and included practical information about how students can play important roles as bystanders. Trainees received practical information about identifying the warning signs of a sexual assault as it evolves (e.g., observing a very intoxicated person being led into a bedroom at a party by a group of people) and took part in active learning exercises regarding the safe delivery of interventions and the manner in which to draw on campus resources after an attack occurs. My data suggest that some college students are already seasoned “cock blockers.” There is no doubt, however, that our nation’s campuses are teeming with untapped bystander resources. Training programs that focus on sensitizing students to the warning signs of sexual victimizations and that provide them with strategies for intervening would be a step in the right direction. While there is some evidence that bystander-intervention programs work to inform students about the techniques of intervention, research suggests that there are obstacles to intervention. Sociologist Melanie Carlson, for example, found that university males often feel that intervening during a potential sexual assault might be perceived as a symbol of weakness, thus threatening their masculinity.30 Moreover, Carlson found that intervening in a public setting where both males and females are present is considered masculine, but for some of her informants, intervening in a private setting where only other men are present was considered weak and therefore unmasculine behavior. This finding suggests that bystander-intervention training may be especially important for all-male housing populations (e.g., male dormitories and fraternities) where powerful masculinity norms are most likely to inhibit intervention. Many college men—as my data demonstrate—are already willing and able to intervene when their female codrinkers are at risk. This sort of behavior needs to be celebrated and encouraged on campus through the use of informational sessions and training programs aimed at high-risk groups. Furthermore, campaigns designed to mobilize bystander intervention could emphasize bystander intervention as a heroic, masculine act. Men (and women) could be encouraged through posters, handouts, and motivational sessions to be vigilant about protecting their fellow students against the threats presented by the “wolves on the campus lawn.” Furthermore, college men and women could receive training on using proactive measures to reduce the risk for victimization. Escorting female friends home from bars or parties, for example, is one simple way to reduce risk. My data suggest that this may already be a common practice. College administrators would be well-advised to tap into the drunk support that holds the college drinking culture together in order to render collective intoxication a less dangerous activity.
Bystander-intervention training should not be limited to issues of sexual victimization. As we know, college students provide a variety of drunk supports that could become part of a formalized effort to reduce the harms of drinking on campus. One model for a broader approach to bystander intervention can be found at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. The Red Watch Band program is aimed at training members of the college community to recognize the signs of toxic drinking and to reduce alcohol-overdose fatalities by teaching students how to respond to alcohol-related emergencies. According to Lara Hunter, coordinator of alcohol and drug clinical services at Stony Brook State University, student movement members wear a red and white watch that “reflects the school’s colors and symbolizes a ‘band’ of students who will ‘watch’ out for one another when every second counts.”31 The movement began in 2008 after a Stony Brook faculty member lost her son to an acute alcohol overdose death while he was away at college. The foundation of the Red Watch program is a four-hour training session during which participants receive training on how to recognize alcohol-related emergencies and how to respond to them effectively (including certification in cardiopulmonary resuscitation). The Red Watch Band is a relatively new movement and evidence on its effectiveness has not yet been established. A pilot evaluation of Red Watch Band’s training program at Stony Brook, however, showed that a sample of student leaders (e.g., resident advisors) reported that Red Watch Band training improved their ability to identify risk and heightened their confidence and willingness to intervene
if they encountered a student who was dangerously intoxicated. It is clear that programs like the Red Watch Band are tapping into informal support systems that are already in existence across American campuses. Program administrators might follow the lead of the Red Watch Band by creating formal training sessions to encourage college drinkers to watch out for one another. Bystander-intervention programs, however, should take student vigilance a step further by encouraging students to disrupt dangerous drinking practices before they result in emergencies. In general, such programs would encourage students with a series of simple pleas (e.g., “Don’t let your friends drink themselves to death.”). Furthermore, dangerous cultural mandates might be challenged with bystander-intervention approaches. For example, efforts should be made to disrupt the cultural practice of getting friends dangerously intoxicated on their twenty-first birthdays. Towards this end, bystander-intervention programs might encourage students through campaigns that take a direct and bracing approach to the hazards of high-pressure drinking contexts (e.g., “Don’t kill the birthday boy/girl.”). According to my data, far too few college students attempt to stop their intoxicated drinking partners before they take their inebriation to a dangerous level. Thus, concerted efforts to mobilize college drinkers against harmful drinking practices could become a part of a general bystander-intervention movement. Universities could encourage this kind of behavior at freshman orientations, as part of first-year programs, at dorm meetings, and at mandatory Greek functions. Universities could seek to politicize and mobilize drunk supporters using bold and plain language that students can relate to (e.g.,“Don’t let your friend get raped.” “Don’t let your friend drown in his/her own vomit.”). If college officials are committed to reducing harm on campus, they would be well-advised to find creative ways to energize the college student population to use drunk support to reduce dangerous drinking and to confront harm and risk whenever and wherever they see it.