The Dunedin alcohol partnership is undertaking two major projects in the next year - one to bring alcohol awareness programmes to 12- and 13-year-olds at school, and the other to investigate drinking cultures in local sports clubs and codes and work towards introducing a possible code of conduct for players and clubs, particularly rugby clubs, regarding alcohol use.
The partnership, also known as Drinksafe, is made up of the District Licensing Agency, Dunedin police and Public Health South.
In his annual report to the Dunedin City Council's planning and environment committee, the council's liquor licensing co-ordinator Kevin Mechen said the school alcohol awareness project aimed to make children aware of the harms associated with the abuse or misuse of alcohol.
Research had shown that by the time people were 18, 95% had established drinking habits, so more emphasis needed to be placed on educating younger people, he said.
The "ideal" age for education of this sort was 12 or 13, when young people were beginning to experiment with various aspects of their lives.
The project had already begun.
He had talked to an educationalist about how it might fit with the school curriculum, a psychologist and one school principal, and was now working on the best way to deliver the programme in schools.
He envisaged having someone speak to groups of children around the year 8 age, away from teachers and parents, about their or their family's experiences with alcohol and how they felt about it.
He also imagined something like a web-based help tool for parents.
The idea was probably going to be controversial, he said.
"I'd expect some opposition to it."
He hoped to be able to mitigate any opposition by working first with teachers and parents to explain the purpose of the programme.
It was a project that was likely to take longer than a year to get established.
Other places had dismissed the idea of alcohol awareness programmes in schools, because the research often said they did not work, but research so far had usually only covered a few months of such efforts, and it took about six years to actually change a culture, he said.
The other major project for the year focused on the drinking culture of sports clubs in Dunedin.
The project was started last year, and the Otago Rugby Football Union was already aware of the intention of Drinksafe to work with various clubs to raise awareness of drinking practices with a view to introducing change.
Mr Mechen said the first part of the project would be to investigate how alcohol was perceived within clubs/codes and what the perception was of the expectations of players when it came to drinking; and then look at what drinking practices actually were.
I would be a concern, for example, he said, if players who did not want to drink did so because they felt there was some expectation to drink if they wanted to be part of the team.
He was also aware that drinking events, such as the "court sessions", were still a part of rugby culture.
The projects would both go on into next year, as would several other Drinksafe projects, including projects to reduce alcohol related harm in North Dunedin, among young people in general, and looking at the extent to which people were becoming intoxicated in Dunedin bars.
