The 2020 WHO–UNICEF–Lancet Commission Report includes a section about commercialized gambling and its impact on kids. It is a major achievement to have gambling in this type of report appearing alongside other unhealthy commodity industries.
You read the report and the highlighted sections dealing with commercialized gambling here: 2020 UNICEF and WHO Report referencing gambling
Gambling has been normalized among young people and is an unconscious drain on their cash. The constant temptation of having a gambling app in your pocket leads to a stream of spending that’s hard to control. Phones are distracting enough as it is, whether it is the unanswered WhatsApp messages in your pocket or 200 Instagram pictures you’ve yet to like. Now betting companies are exploiting the iPhone generation’s obsession with our phones to hook us into betting more, and more frequently.
According to Financial Times, more than one-fifth of 18 to 24-year-olds confessed to gambling in 2017.
This study in The Australian Journal of Public Health explored children’s awareness of sports betting advertising and how this advertising may influence children’s attitudes, product knowledge and desire to try sports betting.
Results: Children recalled in detail sports betting advertisements that they had seen, with humor the most engaging appeal strategy. They were also able to describe other specific appeal strategies and link these strategies to betting brands. Many children described how advertisements demonstrated how someone would place a bet, with some children recalling the detailed technical language associated with betting.
Conclusions: Children had detailed recall of sports betting advertisements and an extensive knowledge of sports betting products and terminology.
This report from the Productivity Commission of Australia (the Australian Government’s independent research and advisory body) provides an in-depth analysis of the effects of the predatory gambling industry on the nation. Gambling, and specifically “pokies” or video slot machines, became pervasive across almost the entire Australian nation by 1995.
Community backlash against slot machines in Switzerland caused the nation to ban slot machines outside of casinos in 2005. Widespread concerns in Russia about gamblers losing their life savings and becoming destitute caused that country to ban all gambling, other than in four highly remote regions. Due to increased problem gambling, Norway banned all video slot machines in 2007 and Internet gambling in 2009. The Norwegian gambling authority is implementing “less aggressive” (slower play, low maximum loss rates) gambling machines in smaller numbers than the banned slots.
The major conclusions from the Australian report are:
* Gambling now costs Australian society about $4.5 billion dollars per year, the bulk of costs deriving from video slot machines. These costs exceed benefits when “excess” losses by problem gamblers is included. Cost per year per adult translates to $210. $1 U.S. dollar = $1.08 in Australian dollars as of Oct 23, 2009.
* 42 to 75 percent of total machine losses are paid by moderate and high risk problem gamblers.
* Gambling machines, as contrasted to other forms of gambling such as lottery or tables games account for around 75–80 percent of ‘problem gamblers’ and are found to pose significant problems for ordinary consumers.
* About 2.5 percent of Australian adults are now problem gamblers.
* 8 to 15 percent of Australian problem gamblers seek treatment. “Internationally, around 6-15 per cent of people experiencing problems with gambling are reported to seek help from problem gambling services…People experiencing problems with their gambling often do not seek professional help until a ‘crisis’ occurs — financial ruin, relationship break down, court charges or attempted suicide — or when they hit ‘rock bottom.’
* Help services for problem gamblers using them have worked well overall, but they relate to people who have already developed major problems and are thus not a substitute for preventative measures.
* The potential for significant harm from some types of gambling is what distinguishes gambling from most other enjoyable recreational activities — and underlines the communities’ ambivalence towards it. While many Australians gamble, they remain skeptical about the overall community benefits. For instance, one survey estimated that around 80 percent of Victorian adults considered that gambling had done more harm than good (with little difference between the views of gamblers and non-gamblers). Looking at all Australian surveys, roughly 80 percent of the public wants to see video slot machines removed or their numbers reduced.
* Many people who do not fit the strict criteria for problem gambling are found to experience significant harms. For example, of those people who said that gambling had affected their job performance, some 60 percent were not categorized as ‘problem gamblers.’
* 39 percent of high risk problem gamblers suffered adverse effects on workplace performance.
* Had there been full knowledge at the time about the harmful effects of substantially increasing accessibility to gaming machines in the 1990s, a different model of liberalization, with less widespread accessibility, may well have been seen as appropriate. Western Australia did not follow the approach of other jurisdictions and appears to have far fewer gambling problems.
* The effect of widespread gambling machine availability on the economy can be seen in Australia, where gambling losses reached 3.1 percent of household consumption, 6.3 percent in Northern Australia.
* Beyond the powerful example provided by the early liberalization experiences of Australia, there is a broad range of evidence suggesting a link between proximity and harm.
* 60 percent of Australian teens gamble on video slot machines by the time they are 18 years of age. Over 60 percent of Aussie teens have gambled in some form before they reached 18 years.
* Increased knowledge of gambling in children may have the unintended consequence of intensifying harmful behavior, a risk that should be considered in the design (or even in considering the introduction) of school-based programs. Nevertheless, several insights emerge from the drug, alcohol and driver education literature that may increase the effectiveness of any school-based gambling education programs and potentially reduce the risks of adverse behavioral responses: a school-based education program may be more effective if accompanied by a corresponding change in societal attitudes and a media campaign. For instance, the relatively greater success of school-based tobacco programs (compared with alcohol) is attributed to the fact that these were accompanied by consistent anti–smoking messages in the general media and to the emergence of a strong anti–smoking social movement.
* Australian gamblers are estimated to lose A$790 million per year, about 4 percent of the size of legal gambling, in illegal online gambling and Internet casinos.
* The report found that slot machines are between 6 and 18 times more risky than lotteries
* Around 50 per cent of gaming machine gamblers have false beliefs about how gaming machines work, which pose risks to them…’Faulty cognition’ about slot machine design is strongly associated with problem gambling. 33 percent of high-risk problem gamblers, 20 percent of moderate risk, and 5 percent of recreational gamblers believe that a gambler is more likely to win on a slot machine after losing many times in a row. Some groups of consumers — such as people with intellectual or mental health disabilities, poor English skills, and those who are emotionally fragile (say due to grief) — may be particularly vulnerable to problems when gambling.
This editorial by The Nation declares legalized sports gambling operators play an equal if not greater role in corrupting popular sports than illegal, underground gambling.
This MarketWatch article outlines the move by app developers to tap into the large and growing U.S. sports gambling market by developing ‘freemium’ models for users as young as 13 years old. These models include no purchase required apps where users must view advertising to enter pools and free virtual currency based apps.
This study by the International Centre for Youth Gambling Problems at McGill University finds “approximately one-fifth of parents reported buying a lottery ticket for their children” in Canada.
In its recent report, Arkansas Advocates for Children and Families concludes that a lottery hurts the economic security and well-being of the state’s’ families – regardless of how much money it raised. The report lays out the following reasons: 1) Lotteries function as regressive taxes that disproportionately hurt the economic security of low-income families; 2) Lotteries are unstable sources of tax revenue that can decline from year to year. Overall, any positive effect on state budgets tend to fade over time; 3) Lotteries and other forms of gambling often lead to negative social and economic consequences for children and their Lotteries function as regressive taxes that disproportionately hurt the economic security of low-income families costs which must often be borne by the state; 4) Researchers have found that Georgia’s “Hope Scholarship” lottery, often cited as a model for lotteries in other states, is disproportionately funded by low-income households, while higher-income, more-educated households disproportionately benefit from the scholarships; 5) A lottery would do little to improve access to higher education among the lowest-income citizens and would prey upon those who stand to lose the most from state- sponsored gambling; and 6) If increasing access to higher education is indeed important to Arkansas’s future economic success, then the state should commit to finding a stable, reliable and fair source of funding for it.
This study commissioned by the British Columbia Lottery Corporation shows a link between a parent’s gambling activity and their child’s attitude toward and participation in gambling.
“Youth who report that their parents have gambled in the past year have a significantly higher participation in various gambling activities than youth who report that their parents have not gambled in the past 12 months,” the paper stated.
An addictions psychiatrist Shao-Hua Lu says the expansion of casinos increases the risk of children becoming gamblers later on in life. According to Lu, the likelihood of a person developing a gambling problem as an adult is directly related to their parents’ gambling habits. “It’s no different from how increasing smoking exposure increases subsequent likelihood of smoking addiction.”
One of the many negative effects of the predatory marketing and addictive offerings used regional casinos is it leads ordinary citizens to commit gross acts of family neglect. Children left unattended in casino parking lots while an adult is inside gambling is a common example. This story from The Baltimore Sun reports on another form of family neglect: senior citizens being neglected by those charged with their care because of commercialized gambling.