Underage Drinking

The engagement of young people under the age of 21 into drinking has become a major backlog in the development of a number of nations. Alcohol is the most commonly abused and used drug by the youth in the world. This rate is more alarming than that of tobacco and other illicit drugs (Eaton, 123) . It is responsible for over 5,000 deaths on the worldwide scale. Although it is against the law for people less than 21 years to drink in America, individuals between the ages of 12 and 20 still engage into a lot of drinking. This population drinks over 11% of alcohol consumed in the United States of America. Alcohol is taken in the form of binge drinks (Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, 14).

Alcoholism is a major issue in the world. It affects both developing and developed countries with equal zeal. This menace is so rife that a proper and viable solution should be sought before the matter grows out of hand. The paper will discuss effective and non-effective ways of combating alcoholism among the youth in the modern society. This problem mainly deals with individuals like university, college and even high school students. The best and effective methods of prevention are usually the simplest and cheapest ones that can be adopted by several parents regardless of the situation. Educators also need to assess these problems from a much wider perspective (Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, 16).

It is even more frightening to realize that our own media are at the forefront of perpetuating this erroneous act. Most media stations associate heroic attributes to alcohol in their daily advertisements. Newspapers across the country carry very frightening stories pertaining to the alcohol consumption in their illegal age brackets. Califano reported horrific deaths associated with college alcoholism in the national television set in the US. A study of college students in America’s Ohio State revealed the following horrific findings;

1. Over 60 percent of college men with sexually transmitted diseases like AIDS and herpes were influenced by alcohol during the intercourse.
2.  About 90 percent of the campus rapes occur under the alcohol influence of assailant or victim.
3. Women were reported to get drunk three times more often than men. It was between 1977 and 1993.
4. Close to 95 percent of violent crime on campus is alcohol-related

However, these claims are not supported by living facts as some have no proper baseline to deal with such issues. Some data have little grounds to believe in their statistical significance. They appear to have been pulled from the thin air. Indeed, most have no evidence whatsoever. Some looked very confusing as pertaining to other surveys in the same field. The fourth reason could be that the researches are highly subjective at their best. The   impossible circumstances are always displayed in the media for acceptance by some people who believe in such issues without any second thoughts.

The media is the main source of misconceptions that the youth have concerning the use of alcohol in their lifetime. It is estimated that an average youth will have seen or watched more than 100, 000 beer commercials just between the period of two years and eighteen. It means he, or she must have seen on average over 20 advertisements a day. Practically speaking, would anyone expect this person to wade through all these advertisements without tasting or even heavily taking the stuff? Distorted information is considered to be viable for news in the media. It will in turn influence the public policy. All in all, it cannot help in the reduction of the alcohol abuse in any way you look at it. This menace requires accurate information and unbiased communication (Bonnie, et al, 24) .

The youth risk behavior survey of 2011 found out some statistics regarding drinking habits of high school students. It revealed that over the last thirty days prior to study about 39% drank some amount of alcohol, over 22% were binge drinkers, about 8% drove after drinking alcohol, slightly above 24% rode with a driver under the influence of alcohol.

Consequences of Underage Drinking

Underage drinking comes with several consequences for the youth. These are as illustrated below. Firstly, school problems like absence from school and poor and falling grades in class. Secondly, there arise social problems like fighting and lack of youth in the participation,   in the youth activities. Legal problems are another very common result of this menace. Legal problems include issues like arrests. Physical problems like hangovers or illnesses may also crop up at any time. It may also lead to the unprotected, unplanned, and unwanted sexual activity. Others include sexual assault, higher risk of homicide and suicide, alcohol-related car crashes, and other unintentional injuries like drowning, falls, and burns. Memory lapse may also result from the alcohol consumption in addition to changes in the brain development. Others may die from alcohol poisoning (Bonnie, et al, 29).

Remedies to Underage Drinking

Underage drinking can be prevented through a number of ways and mechanisms. It will require community-based efforts to monitor youth activities and decrease the access of the youth to alcohol. Thus, the minimal drinking age set by the Surgeon General should be encouraged. These laws were effected from the national level right down to the district levels. According to Eaton, national campaigns discouraging underage drinking must be put in place. Alcohol excise taxes must be increased alongside with reducing the exposure of the youth to alcohol (112). These parameters however, require a very continued research in order to determine the success and in the improvement of the effectiveness of the same mechanisms (OAS, 1)

Relationship between Alcoholism and Crime

This research has been developed from various sources such as  newspapers, police foundation departments, intelligence services, and the judiciary. It has looked into account how different departments can be used to share intelligence and information in an integrated manner.  It also encourages ways in which different departments can encourage sharing of information between the vices, crime units, and crime analysts to manage the criminal intelligence. It has created an opportunity for the application of the computerized crime analysis. The police have embraced digital technology as one of the most efficient and effective methods of crime analysis.

The police department and law policymakers have the responsibilities of underage drinking prevention and reduction. Therefore, it is vital to gather enough information in order to come up with a good decision.  The question of how best this information can be received depends on how organized and trained the department is. Information passes through the analyst so that it can be filtered, synthesized, combined and placed in the required context to provide the required results. A lively, intelligent product can provide a decision maker with a concise picture of the crime environment. Most modern policing systems are in a need of a criminal, environmental analyst as the starting point to crime reduction strategies.

The science and art of the crime intelligence can provide a decision maker with a snapshot of criminality. It can also provide a clear understanding of crime trends and patterns through alcoholism (Miller, 76.  Without this, police, chiefs, and inspectors may not have access to vital and synthesized information necessary for the criminology strategic planning. Crimes analysts help to identify a section of the city where crime and other related activities increased. This knowledge makes the relevant department in the intelligence service act accordingly to avoid the possible deterioration of the situation. It is, therefore, necessary to clearly understand the concepts of the intelligence analysis and crime analysis.

Analysis of Drunken Crimes Among the Youth

The public has had a misconceived understanding about this issue due to the misinformed fiction and wrong media presentation.  It has provided the public with an understanding that the intelligence agency is a secretive group that deals with subversive activities that are morally ambiguous. However, there is a notable difference between information gathering and the use of intelligence to influence decisions of law enforcers. This is evident in other disciplines. Therefore, the term has different meanings in terms of different departments that define it according to its application concerning the enthusiasm and the problem they handle.  When different cities and states encounter problems, they use different approaches to solve the problems (Miller, 77).

A  general definition has been designed, in order to come up with an intelligence product that is in a support of decision making leading to law enforcement, crime reduction, and prevention. Therefore, the intelligent knowledge product has the capacity to influence the way of thinking of a decision maker. This product can; therefore, emanate from public awareness, which will be important to individuals who might have defied the earlier prevention mechanisms.

Role of the Community in Alleviating Underage Drinking

The community is comprised of several stakeholders and all have the responsibility of stopping this menace in the environment (Eaton, et al., 79. The school is a community of learners, instructors, and other subordinate staff. The school may not only need the services of internal stakeholders, but also the services of other important stakeholders in the community. The school as an institution will need the services of the internal stakeholders. When the school graduates the youth into the community, then the services of other stakeholders like pastors and administrators among others will come in handy (Eaton et al., 21).

There are several other stakeholders involved in keeping the vice at bay. Teachers play a vital role in the daily running of the school. The principal sets directions in the school. These directions concern both teachers and students. Each category here will have rules and regulations to follow including the one prohibiting the consumption of alcohol. He, or she  provides a detailed structured framework for the school program. He, or she  ensures the delivery of the same programs within the laid down procedures of the Education Ministry. He, or she  will coordinate the activities of teachers, counselors, and other staff in the school.

Parents have a noble role by nurturing the students. They employ the communication method to talk to their children about school issues. It comes when there are some issues affecting the student in school in a negative way. They also indulge the discussion of the assigned home works to their children. The maim role of a student is to seek information whenever in need. They must also seek their parent’s moral guidance.

Remedies to Absolute Alcoholism

Different scholars have tried to analyses the concept of alcoholism for a long period. Although they differ in specifics, they share common components. A large number of these definitions agree that individual analysis supports the police agency while utilizing systematic methods of information intelligence (Johnston, 4). Since alcoholism is considered as a crime in some societies, it is proper to visit crime analysis first before proceeding the connection to alcoholism, especially underage drinking. The best definition of crime analysis is that it is the systematic study of chaotic problems (e.g. burglar alarms, noise complaints and other suspicious activities), crime (e.g. robbery, rape, and burglary), and other police related problems that assist the police in disorder reduction, criminal apprehension, and crime evaluation and prevention. These police related issues include social demographic, spatial, and temporal factors. Although this discipline is called crime analysis, it can include much more than the study of crime incidents because it can also study police related problems like staffing requirements in the police service (Hingson et al, 1).

Alcoholism entails enquiry, investigation and close examination of the scrutinized information (Miller, 77). It is, therefore, not a haphazard or anecdotal procedure, but rather involves the application of social sciences and data collection procedures, statistical techniques, and analytical methods. Anyway, the question arises whether it entails anything to do with underage alcoholism. It employs both quantitative and qualitative data and methods. The use of qualitative methods and data is to examine non-numerical data in order to identify the underlying pattern of relationship and its meaning. Used qualitative methods are such as field research and content ,analysis. Statistical analyses of numerical or categorical data are some of the ways in which quantitative data and methods are applied.

Individual analysis also has its tactical, operational, and strategic components. The tactical feature focuses on immediate issues that are most valuable for the police department. Operational aspect identifies priority areas and the likeliest of problems and strategic components dealing with long term problems that require the input of the police department, agency, or the planning department. Community-based programs are not directly involved in crime reduction activities, but give support to grant applications, feasibility studies, and community relations. The broad range of activities involved in the analysis of alcoholic activities can be categorized as; social analysis, integrated system, hereditary analysis, and hereditary analysis.

Social system deals with and involves the application of a comprehensive collection of data and analysis procedures. This is an important decision, since, it make people understand the problem at hand and ways in which she can advise the relevant authority accordingly. It has a close relationship with a framework of a problem-related policing that is not only concentrated on the remedy of the crime problem, but also on a comprehensive framework to improve the situation at hand (U.S. Department of Health and Human Services 2). The analysis must have an understanding of more theoretical and technical areas. In this case, a qualified analyst should have quantitative research skills like being able to use various software packages and geographical information system. It can be tremendously helpful to analyze the relation between alcohol and spatial temporal crimes and creation of analysis products, which can be helpful in briefing the officers based on environmental criminology and alcoholism ((Miller, 79).

In the integrated System, analysts always share more than enough goals with psychologists. For this reason, both disciplines look forward to influence people’s decision due to their understanding of the environment. They both seek to employ information in its raw form to which the analyst should add value through analytical techniques. One mechanism that we can use is to integrate these two departments in the dissemination through Computer statistics meetings. These are internet enabled and run conferences where someone can air crucial details regarding a common issue. It increases communication between them and makes use of some of their shared resources and human efforts. It will touch more proportion of the youth since the population of the youth is inclined towards the development of technology in the communication field (CDC, 1). Thus, a holistic approach will identify the target offenders as well as time and place for a significant problem related response. Instead of criminal analysis and criminal intelligence working independently and supporting the police in a haphazard way, the offender-related intelligence can use recorded crimes to estimate the impact of the offender’s activities. Two disciplines, crime analysis and intelligence analysis, are hugely influential in the law enforcement operations. Lack of cooperative integration between the two units in different areas of operation hinders their ability to integrative support.

Analysts tend to focus on crime hotspots and identify areas of high density of drinking activities in the hereditary analysis. This method provides a different approach to identify those hotspots and has intentions to provide a contextual framework to temporal analysis of data. It monitors the pattern in which crimes changes over time and are more applicable to arbitrary areas like in an administrative unit. It examines lower crime areas as clearly as possible because they appear to be much overlooked by other analysts. Most data have a tendency of lacking temporal definitions and there is the application of three temporal search techniques for the purpose of comparison (Bonnie and O’Connell, 23).

Temporal analysis of crimes takes place on the regional and national levels. Through annual publications, different communities can compare the rises and falls of crime figures at different times. This analysis is of high importance for some reasons. They provide values for detecting the change in levels with time and diverting the focus from the areas of high concentration to lower concentration. Therefore, it is vital that the data analysis methods include an element of time to reflect upon  the changing nature of the current world. Much of the research tackles varying methods to record changes and the problems of how much historical information to retain. Despite the erroneous facts about underage drinking, it presents an individual problem for the youth.