Pervasive, hard-wired and male: Qualitative study of how UK adolescents view alcohol-related aggression

Abstract

Laboratory studies of alcohol-inexperienced adolescents show that aggression can be primed by alcohol-related stimuli, suggesting that alcohol-related aggression is partly socially learned. Script theory proposes that alcohol-related aggression ‘scripts’ for social behaviors are culturally-available and learned by individuals. The purpose of the study was to understand the content and origins of alcohol-related aggression scripts learned by adolescents. This qualitative focus group study of 40 adolescents (ages 14–16 years) examined alcohol-related aggression scripts. Participants believed aggression and severe injury to be pervasive when young people drink. Viewed through a biological lens, participants described aggression as an ‘instinctive’ and ‘hard-wired’ male trait facilitated by intoxication. As such, alcohol-related aggression was not seen as intended or personally controllable and participants did not see it in moral terms. Females were largely viewed as either bystanders of inter-male aggression or potential victims of male sexual aggression. Participants attributed their views on the frequency and nature of alcohol-related aggression to current affairs and reality television, which they felt portrayed a reality of which they had little experience. The origins of the explicitly biological frameworks that participants used seemed to lie in pre-existing beliefs about the nature of gender differences. Perceptions of the pervasiveness of male alcohol-related aggression, and the consequent failure to view alcohol-related aggression in moral terms, could dispose some young people to alcohol-related aggression. Interventions could target (1) the beliefs that alcohol-related aggression is pervasive and uncontrollable in males, and (2) participants’ dysfunctional views of masculinity that underpin those beliefs.

Gender-Based Violence and Alcohol Consumption in Youth Leisure Contexts: Challenges for Spanish Social Work

“…Both the results of this study and those of others carried out in an international and national context are in agreement in showing that the behaviors categorized as gender-based violence are not perceived as such by their male perpetrators. In the case of this study, the young women found it easier to identify these types of behavior than the young men (FSC, 2018; Tinkler et al, 2018; Whitaker et al, 2018). With regard to the assessment of the violence, they downplay or do not consider as violent those forms that do not involve physical violence including touching, verbal harassment, or persuasion to obtain certain types of behavior, some of which are of a sexual nature.…”

“…In this sense, the violence committed in the spaces of nightlife where alcohol is consumed can be trivialized and understood as a consequence of the context of excesses in which it occurs. It is therefore of great importance to clarify the traits and characteristics that define gender-based violence, an aspect that other studies have also emphasized (Fellmeth et al, 2015; Whitaker et al, 2018) with the purpose of ending the lack of visibility held by certain forms of behavior that constitute violence.…”