Page 3875 - Week 11 - Tuesday, 19 September 2017
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alcohol. It is either added to non-alcoholic drinks or more of it is added to alcoholic drinks than should be. Dr Bridget McPherson, formerly of RMIT, published her PhD on drink spiking in 2007. As part of her research she surveyed 805 people between the ages of 18 and 35 around Australia. Her findings are quite shocking. Dr McPherson reported that 43 per cent of drink spikers had added intoxicating substances to drinks “for fun”. I will say that again: individuals are intentionally trying to make others intoxicated, without their knowledge and against their will, for fun.
Drink spikers seem to be under a complete delusion when it comes to the severity of their actions. Twenty-nine per cent of perpetrators said they did not want to gain control of another person but thought it would “put people in the mood” for consensual sex. Perpetrators tended to believe that this sort of behaviour was acceptable. Let us be clear on this: spiking someone’s food or drink so that you can manipulate them to any degree is completely unacceptable.
The Australian Institute of Criminology report confirms that women are the main targets, accounting for 80 per cent of victims, and young women in particular. Twenty per cent to 30 per cent of reported cases, as we have heard, involved sexual assault and five per cent involved robbery.
I will quote from an editorial from the Tasmanian newspaper the Examiner, which I think sums it up very well:
The perpetrator either wants to rob the victim or cause them physical and emotional harm, such as sexual assault.
Drink spiking is never funny, even as a so called friendly prank. Just who, among your mates, is an expert in managing a substance-induced coma?
There will always be predators, in public places where alcohol is served, who are prepared to spike drinks in order to commit a crime, involving theft or assault.
It is difficult to anticipate a victim’s response. They could become seriously ill or even die. Everybody has a story about how a friend’s drink was spiked and had a bad reaction, or was spiked and was horrified at the clinical possibilities.
I am sure this is true right around the chamber, and I will share a story anonymously that I know of personally. A young man and two young women, university students, were out drinking. They had had a few drinks but they were not wildly drunk. The man and one of the young women were in a relationship and were drinking the same drink and may have easily been drinking each other’s drink. The young man became very ill very quickly, within 10 minutes, and blacked out. Not only was this very scary for the young man who, fortunately, woke the next day only with a loss of memory—still very serious but noting it could have been much worse—but also it was very scary for his girlfriend and friend, who themselves were put in very difficult positions for young people, in having to worry about his care and make decisions about what to do when they did not know exactly what to do and did not know exactly what was going on.
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