The DruGS team’s newly published report finds that more direct engagement with gender, and particularly masculinities, should be central to future efforts to address alcohol and violence. Importantly, the report offers several recommendations for how research and policy on alcohol and violence can more effectively attend to gender.

You can find a copy of the report here.

Analysing gender in research and policy on alcohol-related violence among young people presents findings and recommendations from an international comparative research project on the treatment of gender in research and policy on alcohol-related violence among young people in Australia, Canada and Sweden. The findings are based on an analysis of four datasets:

1. a selection of peer-reviewed, published research on alcohol and violence in Australia, Canada and Swede
2. a selection of alcohol policy and related documents across the three countries
3. qualitative interviews with researchers in the three countries
4. qualitative interviews with policy stakeholders in the three countries

Aiming to generate new insights into the relationship between gender, alcohol and violence, the project on which the report is based investigated how the nexus of these forces is currently addressed in research and policy. Overall, the study findings suggest that more direct engagement with gender, and particularly masculinities, should be central to future research and to recommendations informing contemporary alcohol policy debate, and the report proposes ways in which such an engagement might be supported.

As project lead Professor David Moore explains,

the issue of ‘alcohol-related’ violence among young people in the night-time economy has generated intense policy debate in recent years. While this debate is warranted, its contours and outcomes have been informed by a relatively narrow range of research resources. This project gave us an opportunity to critically explore these discourses and trends, to consider how research and policy could be done differently and, we hope, address the relationships between alcohol, gender and violence more effectively.

The research presented in this report was undertaken by researchers from La Trobe University’s Australian Research Centre in Sex, Health and Society (ARCSHS), the Australian National University’s School of Sociology, Stockholm University’s Department of Social Work and the Centre for Addiction Mental Health’s Institute for Mental Health Research. Funded by an Australian Research Council Discovery Project grant (DP18010036), this project was undertaken between 2018 and 2022.

The project investigator team comprised:

• Professor David Moore (ARCSHS, La Trobe University, Australia)
• Professor Helen Keane (School of Sociology, Australian National University, Australia)
• Emeritus Professor Kathryn Graham (Institute for Mental Health Research, Centre for Addiction and Mental Health, Canada)
• Professor Mats Ekendahl (Department of Social Work, Stockholm University, Sweden)

Further details on project publications available online.