One in five Australian children has been affected by the drinking of others, and many families struggling with parental alcohol problems are not part of the welfare system and remain “hidden” to authorities.
Australian of the Year Rosie Batty is on Tuesday launching areport that examines the role of alcohol and how it relates to family violence.
About half of reported family violence incidents and about half of child protection cases involve alcohol, say researchers from the Foundation for Alcohol Research and Education.
The Hidden Harm report shows the experiences reported by families varied. Most commonly, children witnessed verbal or physical conflict or inappropriate behaviour.
Some were also verbally abused, left unsupervised, physically hurt or exposed to family violence as a result of others’ drinking.
Historically, problems with alcohol have been linked to health problems in the drinker, rather than the impact on the people who interact with them, said Professor Robin Room, report co-author and director of the Centre for Alcohol Policy Research at Turning Point.
“Most of us have important social roles in our lives – being parents or friends – and these are affected by drinking, in terms of being able to perform what we expect from each other,” Professor Room said.
Previous research from the foundation found about 95 per cent of people believed that those who were looking after children should have no more than one or two drinks, he said.
Yet about 30 per cent of children are living in a household with a “risky” drinker – someone who regularly drinks more than five drinks at a time,he said.
The foundation held 20 in-depth interviews with carers who had reported harm to their children from other’s drinking.
They found the drinker harming a child was most often a man, and usually the father of the affected children. Where the drinker was a woman, it was usually the mother.
One person told the researchers her son had developed behavioural problems because of his father’s drinking.
“He gets very emotional because his dad doesn’t come when he says … because he’d had a hard night drinking, because he was hung over the next day or just because he was depressed coming down from the alcohol,” she said.
The research made the scale of the problem clear and the large number of children and families affected, said the foundation’s chief executive, Michael Thorn.
Governments must embrace a broad public health approach with a strong focus on prevention, he said.
The foundation wants national public education campaigns that acknowledge the role of alcohol in family violence and measures that reduce the availability and target the price and promotion of alcohol.
Moo Baulch, chief executive officer of Domestic Violence NSW, said while there were links between the two, domestic violence was not ultimately caused by alcohol.
“Alcohol is not the thing that makes people violent,” she said. “Abusing someone in a relationship is always a choice.”
Ms Baulch said 30 women in NSW were victims of domestic violence homicides between October 2013 and September 2014. Domestic violence costs the NSW economy more than $5 billion a year.
“What we would like to see in NSW is strong leadership from the Premier and community leaders and a much better understanding of domestic and family violence and the impact of trauma across all government agencies,” she said.
“The child protection and family violence system is overburdened. A big injection of money still needs to go into the system.”
– With Anna Patty
http://www.turningpoint.org.au