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Gender violence plan needs to reflect the role of alcohol

October 9, 2025

by Anne-Marie Laslett, Cassandra Hopkins and Ingrid Wilson

Globally, up to one in three women who live with a male partner report he is a heavy drinker. Evidence shows men’s drinking increases the severity and frequency of violence towards women and harms to children.

Yet in Australia and worldwide, most policies to address gender violence still fail to consider the significant role alcohol plays.

Our new research, published last week, reviewed and analysed the evidence in three major international reviews about men’s drinking.

We wanted to understand the range of impacts that men’s heavy drinking has on women and children worldwide. We also examined whether alcohol policies and interventions specifically address these harms.

Our study shows the impact on women and children is profound – but the harms are often understudied and overlooked. Here’s what we found.

Women carry the burden
We already knew that men’s heavy drinking exacerbates physical violence, leads to more intimate partner violence experienced by women, and to more severe injuries.

However, our new research reveals a much wider range of harms that occur to women when men drink heavily. Heavy drinking can include binge drinking and alcohol dependence.

The psychological impact on women can be profound. We found men’s heavy drinking can contribute to controlling behaviour and irrational sexual jealousy towards partners, sexual aggression and coercion, and emotional abuse that includes humiliating or insulting the partner.

Women also reported alcohol-related harms that are not widely studied or understood. These included women experiencing social isolation and economic abuse, where household resources are diverted to the man’s drinking.

Financial problems for the family can have serious flow-on effects. For example, buying alcohol may not leave enough money for essentials such as food and clothing. Money issues can trigger conflicts which then escalate into violence towards women.

Men’s alcohol use can also lead to missed work or unemployment. This can reduce the family income and put more pressure on women to work extra hours, often alongside existing caregiving duties. They may then be at risk of other harmful situations or exploitation, such as being forced into sex work – reported by some women in lower income countries.

Children become more unsafe
The impact of men’s heavy drinking on children has been even less well studied than its effect on women.

Yet our research shows when men drink heavily, their children are more likely to experience neglect, poor mental health, disrupted schooling and family instability – all of which negatively affects their development.

Men who drink heavily often prioritise alcohol over their children’s needs and this can create dysfunctional family environments. Their children are also more likely to become the targets of violence and witness violence against others.

As a consequence of these sometimes unstable and unsafe family environments, children may often feel less emotionally close to fathers who drink heavily. Evidence shows fathers who drink heavily are less involved in parenting.

A gap in policy
Alcohol research and policy, and general policies, seldom target the diverse impacts of men’s drinking on women and children.

Our study highlights an uncomfortable reality: to prevent violence against women and children, we also need to focus on men’s drinking – and the wider social and economic inequalities that contribute to harms to women and children.

We need interventions that explicitly target the social norms around masculinity, including those that encourage and normalise heavy drinking and reward aggression.

But we also need to address other societal factors that can amplify problematic aspects of men’s heavy drinking – including men’s histories of trauma, mental health and social disadvantage – without diminishing their individual accountability.

Addressing the link between alcohol and gender violence
In Australia, the current National Plan to End Gender Based Violence pays minimal attention to alcohol.

However, in 2024, the federal government led a rapid review into preventing gender violence. It drew specific attention to the role of alcohol and called on states and territories to change their liquor regulations. For instance, by restricting alcohol sales, delivery timeframes and advertising.

Our research supports these recommendations. And suggests we need more nuanced alcohol strategies that are tailored to specifically address harms from men’s drinking and consider when, why and how men drink.

Strategies to reduce harmful alcohol use should be integrated with broader gender-based violence prevention. For instance, by combining interventions for men who are in treatment for alcohol problems and use violence, and reducing alcohol consumption at home, for example, by limiting home delivery.

Men’s heavy drinking can be seriously harmful for women and children. This means we can’t address the epidemic of men’s violence in our community without tackling alcohol use head on.

Note: Anne-Marie Laslett, Professor, Centre for Alcohol Policy Research, La Trobe University; Cassandra Hopkins, PhD Candidate, Centre for Alcohol Policy Research, La Trobe University, and Ingrid Wilson, Associate Professor, Health and Social Sciences, Singapore Institute of Technology ■

This piece is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license.

WHO launches bid to quantify youth alcohol harm

September 30, 2025

The WHO’s EU-backed programme to reduce alcohol harm today launched an effort to quantify the burden alcohol places on young people to inform better alcohol policy.

“One-in-three injury deaths is attributable to alcohol and it is the leading cause of disability and premature death among young people in Europe,” said the WHO’s Catherine Paradis (pictured).

Attendees to the EUSEM 2025 emergency medicine conference in Vienna confirmed alcohol is a factor in many cases they see, with some saying it plays a part in well over half.

The WHO’s Evidence into Action Alcohol Project (EVID-ACTION) now hopes to create a more robust evidence base about alcohol-related emergency cases among young people to help inform policy.

Canada changed its alcohol laws thanks to an effort to gather emergency department data following the death of a 14-year-old after drinking super-sized cans of alcopops in 2018.

EVID-ACTION invited up to five emergency departments to collect data from cases involving 12- to 24-year-olds next summer, potentially paving the way for larger scale data collection.

The initiative arose from the European Health Alliance on Alcohol, a recently-formed group of over 20 medical organisations which last month condemned EU labelling proposals. ■

Medics sound alarm on EU alcohol proposals

September 15, 2025

Two recent EU labelling proposals risk decades of progress in reducing alcohol-related harm, warned the European Health Alliance on Alcohol, formed in May to give a voice to 1.7m health professionals.

In June the Council of the European Union proposed allowing the term “low-alcohol” to be used for wines of up to 6% alcohol and allowing digital-only labelling for displaying health information and ingredients.

Together the proposals “represent a dangerous precedent that blurs the line between public health and commercial interests. They risk undermining clinical guidance, weakening consumer protections, and increasing public confusion,” the alliance said . The Belgian government said it opposed the “low-alcohol” label last week.

Allowing “low-alcohol” labels would mislead consumers and create a false sense of safety, undermining cancer prevention efforts, the EHAA said. And allowing QR code digital labels would mean health information would reach precious few people.

The alliance said the solution is to label products which are 6% alcohol or below as “reduced alcohol” and to insist that on-package health and ingredients labelling should be mandatory. Fewer than one-in-a-thousand people scanned QR codes in pilots.

“There are few areas in public health where the evidence is as clear as it is with alcohol: the harms are well documented, the burden is enormous, the financial cost is unsustainable, and solutions exist. Prevention is not only possible—it is essential,” said Monica Tiberi of the European Society of Cardiology. ■

Banned ad distribution “helpful” says ad regulator

August 7, 2025

The UK’s advertising self-regulator is in favour of the distribution of alcohol ads it banned, Alcohol Review was told, after millions were exposed to a banned ad this week.

“We think an ad being used in media reports for illustrative purposes is helpful and in the public interest in providing context for the reader or viewer to find out more about our decision,” the ASA said.

A story on a banned ad from Brewdog first appeared on the PA newswire and was picked up by the BBC, Daily Mail, Scottish TV, various regional newspapers, as well as the marketing, advertising and food trade press. Together their potential reach was in the millions.

“It is not our role to advise media on how they report on our decisions,” the ASA said when asked if its decisions should be reported in a way which does not provide free exposure to an ad it had ruled against. It says viewers and readers “sought out” such ad exposure.

The ASA said that being reported to have broken the advertising rules deters companies from doing it again. Brewdog has yet to get the message. It had six ASA rulings go against it in the last five years. Rival giants like AB Inbev, Carlberg, Diageo and Heineken had one or none at all.

Critics say reporting on banned ads is a big win for Brewdog, with the brand partly defined by its penchant for rule-breaking and ad illustrations used in the reporting provide it with advertising impacts indistinguishable from those of a paid ad.

Meanwhile editors and algorithms choose which stories an audience sees, not the audience members themselves. ■

UPDATED: Ireland delays alcohol health labels

July 25, 2025

The Irish government delayed alcohol health labelling from May next year unit until 2028 at a cabinet meeting on Monday, disappointing health advocates.

Some in the government have been convinced the labels may undermine ongoing EU-US trade negotiations if they were seen as a barrier to trade. Health advocates dispute this assessment. Health ministerJennifer Carroll MacNeill said she was “not pleased”.

The Irish Medical Organisation went further calling the delay a “serious threat to public health” with “health being ignored in favour of corporate interests”. “The longer this Government delays, the more irreversible damage is done,” said the organisation’s president Dr Anne Dee.

“To say that this delay is a blow for public health in Ireland is an understatement. It is a failure of leadership and of democracy,” said Sheila Gilheany CEO of the NGO Alcohol Action Ireland. And many alcohol products in Ireland already carry the labels, making any delay “farcical if not so serious”.

“Re-examining the policy at this stage, under pressure from commercial interests, would not only weaken Ireland’s credibility but risk setting a damaging precedent across Europe,” said the newly-formed European Health Alliance on Alcohol in a letter to the Irish government last week.

The weeks leading up to the decision were filled with selective leaks about a likely delay until 2029. Coverage of the decision–which still has not been fomally announced–looks likely to be out-done that of a larger spending announcement and the summer recess.

AR This may offer a salutory tale for the UK where the government earlier this month initiated a bid to introduce alcohol health labels. At the same time it bowed to industry pressure to drop all the most effective alcohol health policies from its plans. The road ahead is not easy. ■

The beer gardens of Bulawayo

July 9, 2025

By Maurice Hutton

Kontuthu Ziyathunqa – Smoke Rising – was what they used to call Bulawayo when the city was the industrial powerhouse of Zimbabwe. Now, many of its factories lie dormant or derelict. The daily torrent of workers flowing eastward at dawn, and back out to the high-density western suburbs at dusk, has diminished to a trickle.

But there is an intriguing industrial-era institution that lives on in most of the older western suburbs (formerly called townships). It is the municipal beer hall or beer garden, built in the colonial days for the racially segregated African worker communities. There are dozens of these halls and garden complexes, still serving customers and emitting muffled sounds of merriment to this day.

Like other urban areas in Rhodesia (colonial Zimbabwe), Bulawayo was informally segregated from its inception, and more formally segregated after the second world war. Under British rule (1893-1965) and then independent white minority rule (1965-1980), municipal drinking amenities were built in the townships to maintain control of African drinking and sociality. At the same time, they raised much-needed revenue for township welfare and recreational services.

I researched the history of these beer halls and gardens as part of my PhD project on the development of the segregated African townships in late colonial Bulawayo. As my historical account shows, they played a key role in the contested township development process.

From beer halls to beer gardens
Bulawayo’s oldest and most famous beer hall, MaKhumalo, also known as Big Bhawa, was built more than a century ago, in 1913. It still stands at the heart of the historic Makokoba neighbourhood. It’s enormous, but austere, and in the early days it was oppressively managed. Drinkers would describe feeling like prisoners there.

The more picturesque beer gardens began to emerge in the 1950s, reflecting the developmental idealism of Hugh Ashton. The Lesotho-born anthropologist was educated at the Universities of Oxford, London and Cape Town, and took up the new directorship of African administration in Bulawayo in 1949.

He was tuned into new anthropological ideas about social change, as well as developmental ideas spreading through postwar colonial administrations – about “stabilising” and “detribalising” African workers to create a more passive and productive urban working class. He saw a reformed municipal beer system as a key tool for achieving these goals.

Ashton wanted to make the beer system more legitimate and the venues more community-building. He proposed constructing beer garden complexes with trees, rocks, games facilities, food stalls and events like “traditional dancing”. So the atmosphere would be convivial and respectable, but also controllable, enticing all classes and boosting profits to fund better social services. As we shall see, this strategy was full of contradiction.

Industrial beer brewing
MaKhumalo, MaMkhwananzi, MaNdlovu, MaSilela. These beer garden names, emblazoned on the beer dispensaries that stick up above the ramparts of each garden complex, referenced the role that women traditionally played in beer brewing in southern Africa. This helped authenticate the council’s “home brew”.

But the reality was that the beer was now produced in a massive industrial brewery managed by a Polish man. It was delivered in trucks and stored in steel tanks at the tops of the dispensary buildings, to be piped down into the plastic mugs of thirsty punters at small bar windows below. (It was also sold in plastic calabashes and cardboard cartons.)

And the beer garden bureaucracy, which offered a rare opportunity for African men to attain higher-grade public sector jobs, became increasingly complex and strictly audited.

As the townships rapidly expanded, with beer gardens dotted about them, sales of the council’s “traditional” beer – the quality of which Ashton and his staff obsessed over – went up and up.

Extensive beer advertising in the council’s free magazine mixed symbols of tradition (beer as food) with symbols of modern middle-classness.

Beer monopoly system
The system’s success relied on the Bulawayo council having a monopoly on the sale of so-called “native beer”. This traditional brew is typically made by malting, mashing, boiling and then fermenting sorghum, millet or maize grains. Racialised Rhodesian liquor laws restricted African access to “European” beers, wines and spirits (although restrictions eased from the late 1950s).

So, the beer hall or garden was the only public venue where Africans could legally drink (apart from a tiny elite, for whom a few exclusive “cocktail lounges” were built). The council cracked down harshly on “liquor offences” like home brewing.

This beer monopoly system was quite prevalent in southern and eastern Africa, though rarely at the scale to which it grew in Bulawayo. Nearly everywhere, the system caused resentment among African townspeople, and so it became politically charged.

In several colonies, beer halls became sites of protest, or were boycotted (most famously in South Africa). And they usually faced stiff competition from illicit drinking dens known as shebeens.

In Bulawayo, the more the city council “improved” its beer system after the second world war, the more contradictory the system became. It actively encouraged mass consumption of “traditional” beer, so that funds could be raised for “modern” health, housing and welfare services in the townships. Ashton himself was painfully aware of the contradictions.

In his guest introduction to a 1974 ethnographic monograph on Bulawayo’s beer gardens, he wrote:

The ambivalence of my position is obvious. How can one maintain a healthy community and a healthy profit at one and the same time? I can almost hear the critical reader questioning my morality and even my sanity. And why not? I have often done so myself.

Many citizen groups – both African and European – questioned the system too. They called it illogical, if not immoral; even some government ministers said it had gone too far. And when some beer gardens were constructed close to European residential areas, to cater for African domestic workers, many Europeans reacted with fear and fury.

As Zimbabweans’ struggle for independence took off in the 1960s, African residents increasingly associated the beer halls and gardens with state neglect, repression, or pacification. They periodically boycotted or vandalised them. Nevertheless, with few alternative options, attendance rates remained high: MaKhumalo recorded 50,000 visitors on one Sunday in 1970.

After independence
After Zimbabwe gained independence in 1980, the township beer gardens remained in municipal hands. They continued to be popular, even though racial desegregation had finally given township residents access to other social spaces across the city.

The colonial-era municipal beers continued to be produced, with Ngwebu (“The Royal Brew”) becoming a patriotic beverage for the Ndebele – the city’s majority ethnic group.

But with the deindustrialisation of Bulawayo since the late 1990s, tens of thousands of blue collar workers have moved to greener pastures, mostly South Africa. The old drinking rhythm of the city’s workforce has changed, and for the young, the beer gardens hold little allure. Increasingly, they have been leased out to private individuals to run.

Nevertheless, there is always a daily trickle of regulars to the beer gardens, where mugs and calabashes are passed around among friends or burial society members. Some punters play darts or pool. And there are always some who sit alone, ruminating – perhaps in the company of ghosts from the past.
The beer gardens of Bulawayo embody the moral and practical contradictions of late colonial development – and the ways in which such systems and infrastructures may live on, but change meaning, in the post-colony.

Maurice Hutton is Honorary Research Fellow, Global Development Institute, University of Manchester .It is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. ■