In a country where children are exposed to gambling at an early age, risk evaluation should start at an early age. This was a comment we made during one of the numerous industry meetings, sponsored by GamCare the gambling addiction support service, and prior to the new Gambling Act of 2005. The fact is that in the United Kingdom children are more exposed to gambling as it starts in the form of a family pastime. This is a country where legendary racing events such as the Derby and the Grand National often are celebrated with friends and family gambling in sweepstakes on a lottery basis.
Indeed, the point we made then is that from Greece to Guatemala, and from China to the Antipodes, children grow up taking chances in games where the coin flip and the tick-tack-toe options run at even money (1-1) and 2-1, respectively. From here on some of them move on to the ubiquitous family dice board games that have chances leading up to 35-1, while card games are not far behind. Infancy leads on to the youth poker games that nowadays have a real chance of becoming online poker games with all the perils that this entails.
It is encouraging, then, to see that the Labour Party is backing GamCare’s proposals to teach about the mechanics and risks of gambling. To educate children that “fruit machines” are not the mistakenly fun arcade games where they can lose pennies (in the UK children can gamble in arcades from 8 years of age) but, more insidiously, the gambling machines that can be found as fixed odds betting terminals at high street bookmakers - well out of reach of services like GamCare and with little or no problem gambling counsel.
As there have been proposals for education or instruction on the risks of gambling at secondary schools in the country, the proposals we made were for the basic statistics that are the compounded factors in odds making to be taught at schools as part of the basic curriculum. Needless to say, it is down to educationalists to elaborate and develop the difference between odds and probabilities, but that this is the real task ahead.
Our radical proposal goes beyond education on the matter of the “more positive aspects of gambling" that GamCare suggests, or to the fact that pupils need information to prepare them for the adult world, as stated by the shadow Education Secretary, Stephen Twigg when commenting on GameCare’s Response to the Department for Education Review of Personal, Social, Health and Economics (PSHE) Education. Our proposal is more in line with his comment that, "this is something that shouldn't be left to chance. With the rise of online gambling, there is clearly a need for children and young people to be given good advice.”
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The proposals made by our media do not have any intention of turning schools into society’s nurse as “cure-all of society's ills”, as Graham Stuart, Conservative MP and chairman of the Commons education select committee, says. It is more about schools having the “primary aim to equip children with the basic skills of a decent education," as Stuart also claims, because a decent education should imply an education on risk taking, which not only relates to gambling but also to major decisions that may affect their whole lives.
Risk taking, which is what gambling entails, is not a game or a sport, but one of life’s basic axioms. In the form of a gambling proposition, risk taking may lead to excess like any other addictive element, like the use, abuse or misuse of drugs, alcohol or food. We are wholly in agreement with GamCare’s stance on the matter and with the argument that education on risk taking and gambling “is therefore as strong as that which supports the need for education about other risky behaviours such as drinking alcohol, smoking or even taking drugs.”
If you ask any problem gambler as to the origins of his or her dependence, this goes back to the total lack of knowledge of the nature of the risks that were being taken, as social pastime turned into habit and then on to personal family and social problems. Maybe this would have been the outcome anyway, but one thing is to cross the road with one’s eyes open and another to do it blindfolded. Educating children on the risks of gambling is just like teaching them to cross one of life’s major roads.
As a footnote, we refer to the rabid opposition to these educational proposals spearheaded by a Daily Mail columnist who, after misrepresenting (or not understanding) the basic tenets of the proposals, moves on to a political attack on the daily’s political foes, raving against all and sundry on the side of Responsible Gaming for supporting “the latest example of the agenda of turning the forbidden (gambling) into the acceptable”. A footnote it remains along with any obscurantist comment that insists on children’s sex education and other civil and health issues as being the result of expulsion from the Garden of Eden. (E-12.09.11)
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