We Don't Serve Teens
College students, it's your turn!
For most of us here at The Century Council, college is a couple years in the rearview mirror. While our Research Department provides us with great quantitative and qualitative research on the drinking habits of college students, there’s something to learn from those still schlepping to lectures.
For that reason, The Century Council is happy to announce that we will be partnering with four universities across the nation in helping them to carry through their plans to fight college binge drinking. The four universities are University of Minnesota-Twin Cities, The University of Alabama-Tuscaloosa, The George Washington University, and Ohio University.
These students’ campaigns will be based upon the work they did for the 2009 National Student Advertising Competition, an annual competition hosted by the American Advertising Federation. These schools will receive grant money to evaluate college binge drinking, implement a strategy to fight it, and then measure their results.
We’re focused on college binge drinking in other ways as well. We’ve provided a research grant to the Emergency Medicine Foundation (EMF) to learn more about the role of emergency services with regard to college binge drinking. We’ve also partnered with the Center for Leadership in Public Service at Fisher College to further explore the issue of college binge drinking from the perspective of campus law enforcement.
While this isn't the first time we've focused on alcohol education for college students, we're very excited to work with students from these schools!
In the News: Social Hosting Laws Incriminate Parents of Underage Drinkers
Far too often we read a heartbreaking story of a tragedy involving underage drinking, and more often than not the source of alcohol for these youth is their family or friends. For nearly 20 years, The Century Council has been addressing the issue of adults providing alcohol to youth through stiffer penalties and tougher social host laws.
Medheadlines, a website that publishes articles on important medical news and other health information, recently posted an article that dealt with social host laws. "Social Hosting Laws Incriminate Parents of Underage Drinkers," mentions many important issues involving this very important component to stopping underage drinking. In 2006, The Century Council joined the Federal Trade Commission and other national organizations to launch a public awareness campaign to stop underage drinking. This initiative called "We Don't Serve Teens," is designed to inform adults that providing youth with alcohol is unsafe, illegal, and irresponsible. What this program showed was that overwhelmingly, parents, do not believe it is acceptable for other adults to provide beverage alcohol to underage youth. In a commissioned survey, ninety-six percent of adults said it is unacceptable for another parent or other adult to provide alcohol to their teenager without their permission. A significant percentage of parents said they would contact the police, file charges against the other parent, or take similar action if they discovered their child was being given access to alcohol.
The Century Council supports license suspension penalties, mandatory community service, fines, and graduated penalties for repeat offenders who furnish alcohol to minors. Working to restrict access to alcohol by those under the legal purchase age is everyone's goal, but to achieve success, we must all take action together and work to change the perception that the underage consumption of alcohol is a rite of passage.