Bad Girls: why so much drinking

Girls and alcohol, a drunken youth. This is what emerges from the latest survey by the Istituto Superiore di Sanità, which has been devoting particular attention to the problem for years.

While the final figures will only be released at the end of the month, numerous newspapers are already venturing previews, drawing on the first data made available by the Institute.

Let's start with the numbers: in Italy there are an estimated 300,000 minors with at-risk drinking behaviour, that is around 7%, and one striking fact is that young Italians lead Europe in how early they start consuming alcohol.
So much so that among the under-14 age group, an estimated 70% have used alcohol at least once.
And of all the cases of alcohol intoxication treated in hospitals, a full 13% involve minors.

Young girls stand out for alcohol abuse, even before the age of 14, showing behaviour at risk of alcoholism at twice the rate of the national female average as a whole.

The United Nations prescribes total abstinence from alcohol up to the age of 15, all the more so since among the female population an increased risk of breast cancer has been found as alcohol consumption rises above the threshold of 12 g per day (a glass of beer), a risk threshold that can increase by 25% when reaching 3 glasses a day.

There are many reasons for such a widespread unhealthy habit: first of all, unprecedented ease of access to alcoholic products, despite the express ban on sales to minors under 16. Between happy hours, free drinks and the like, anyone can get hold of their dose of alcohol without much oversight. These figures alone indicate that drinking takes place mainly outside the home and away from meals, or on occasions when no food is eaten at all. This has spawned the most extravagant fads, geared towards unconditional intoxication, from so-called "binge drinking" to "drink as much as you can".

Widespread consumption and the ever younger age of first access bring with them an alarming fact: a natural and inevitable rise in the tolerance threshold and therefore in the perception of intoxication.
Hence two factors: ever greater medical and health risks linked to the increase in per-capita consumption, and the risk that drinkers move on from alcohol to other narcotic substances to achieve the high that alcohol can no longer deliver once tolerance thresholds have become too high.

Young girls have thus become the target of alcohol advertising: they drink out of a spirit of emulation; theirs is a hedonism of emancipation from social clichés.