Next month’s Journal of Studies on Alcohol and Drugs will include a supplement containing the newest report from the US National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism on alcohol abuse on college campuses. The numbers, gathered from government databases and national surveys of college students, are fairly shocking: alcohol related deaths, and incidents of binge drinking and drunk driving all increased during 1998 and 2005. According to the study:

From 1999 to 2005, the percentage of students aged 18 to 24 who said they had binged on alcohol in the last month rose from 41.7 percent to nearly 45 percent; drunk driving proportions among this group increased from 26.5 percent to almost 29 percent and the number of drinking-related deaths went from 1,440 in 1998 to 1,825 in 2005, an increase of 3 percent. But the greatest increase was seen in death from unintentional poisoning, which nearly tripled between 1998 and 2005.

Equally disheartening are the numbers given for the (mostly violent and sexual) crimes associated with drinking [per year].

• More than 696,000 students between the ages of 18 and 24 are assaulted by another student who has been drinking.
• More than 97,000 students between the ages of 18 and 24 are victims of alcohol-related sexual assault or date rape.
• 400,000 students between the ages of 18 and 24 had unprotected sex and more than 100,000 students between the ages of 18 and 24 report having been too intoxicated to know if they consented to having sex.

97,000 alcohol-related sexual assaults or date rapes a year. That’s staggering. But then let’s consider the 100,000 students “too intoxicated to know if they consented to having sex.” Let’s go over this again: to consent, as we define it, implies the capacity to make clear, enthusiastic, desicions about taking part in a given sexual act. Many states have laws saying that a person who is intoxicated cannot consent, as their capacity to do so has been impaired. How many of those 100,000 students should be added to the 97,000? These numbers just seem to get bigger and bigger….

The lead researcher on this report was quoted in Science Daily saying:

“The fact that we’re not making progress is very concerning,” says…Ralph Hingson, Sc.D., M.P.H., director of the NIAAA’s division of epidemiology and prevention research. “The irony,” he adds, “is that during this same time period, our knowledge of what works as far as intervention in this age group has increased. That knowledge isn’t yet being put into place.”

The interventions Hingson is referring to—such as “counseling high-risk drinkers, raising the price of alcohol, and getting colleges, community health departments and police to work together on the problem“—largely seem to address alcohol abuse either on an individual level, or as an evil in and of itself; despite the open discussion of alcohol-related assaults, there is no mention of assault prevention-based education. While preventing alcohol-related deaths and drunk-driving should of course be priorities on college campuses, it seems clear that assault prevention must be part of the equation, considering the numbers. Excluding it strikes me as being similar to absitnence education: by teaching young people that sex should be avoided and has bad consequences, you are not eqiupping them with the information they need to face the realities of their lives if they do indeed choose to have sex. I’m all for getting kids to drink less, but let’s simultaneously make sure that they understand what consent is and isn’t, and what kind of behavior isn’t acceptable, drunk or not.  Perhaps I’m being a naive optimist here, but truly understanding how your behavior harms your classmates, and wanting to avoid being the cause of that harm sounds like something that would disuade students from getting drunk out of their minds. But as things are, I don’t think that drunk assault is taken seriously enough for many students to really understand the harm.