Staying Safe from Drink Spiking

DRINK SPIKING AWARENESS

The Problem, and why it is important

The focus of our project is to raise awareness and encourage preventative measures for drink spiking at the University of Warwick. To get a feel for the scale of the problem, we conducted a survey. The survey was shared on social media platforms and received an overwhelming 410 responses. Of those surveyed, we found that 31% had been spiked previously, and 77% knew someone who had been spiked. This affirmed our concern for drink spiking incidences. Undoubtedly, most people are aware of drink spiking but most underestimate this prevalence. Although we agreed that we could not stop drink spiking from occurring, we decided to focus on informing students of its prevalence and ways in which they could protect themselves. We believe drink spiking was a good topic to focus our project on, due to its importance to us. We have all known someone who has been spiked, and have seen the impact it has. To witness it first-hand has made a prominent impact on our views on the issue of spiking, thus for us, it is vital to inform others of the issue. Drink spiking is illegal and extremely dangerous, and can lead to a number of unwarranted ends, such as memory loss, lack of mobility and assault. We aim to reduce the likelihood of this occurring to Warwick students by raising awareness of the symptoms and preventative measures that can be utilised.

With university students particularly taking part in the ‘culture of intoxication’ (Measham & Brain, 2005), it is now not only the level of alcohol consumption that is concerning, but also the susceptibility of these beverages being laced with debilitating drugs. Studies on drink spiking support our survey findings and confirm the vulnerability of the student population towards this threat. A survey conducted on over 6,000 students at 3 universities found that more than 1 in 3 students had reported being drugged (that is 462 students with 539 incidences being reported) and 83 students had also reported 172 instances in which they had drugged someone (Swan et al, 2017).

Based on the literature, the threat of spiking also appears to be a gendered one, where women are more likely to be spiked and encounter negative consequences, such as sexual assault. University campuses have become an ‘increasingly dangerous location’ (Burgess, Donovan, & Moore, 2009), particularly for women, to the extent that many engage in ‘constraining behaviours’. Such behaviours are purposely buying bottled beverages, so a thumb can be placed over the top to prevent spiking, and abandoning drinks which have been left unattended (Sheard, 2011). Although women are mainly targeted, men still fall victim to spiking incidences and so our project was not targeted specifically at one gender but provides information which is useful for all.

The threat of drink spiking, and the potential for assault, has caused a moral panic amongst university students. Through this project we aim to alleviate some of this fear through providing information and raising awareness on preventative techniques and symptoms of spiking, so that if and when a spiking incident occurs, students can be prepared.

Target audience

We chose university students as our target population. To tailor our intervention to this group of people we thought about how we, as people who are at university, might be persuaded to take more care with our drinks. We aimed to reach this demographic by putting posters up in common areas around campus and in popular clubs in the local area.

In 2003, Lawson analysed several drink spiking campaigns in Australia and found that the majority focused on the victims; blaming women for their lack of vigilance over their drinks. Lack of notability for actual perpetrators has lead us to include a slogan for perpetrators along-side information for victims.

The intervention

Our intervention combined a number of techniques which we believe university students would be more susceptible to. First of all, we conducted a short, brief survey and shared this on Facebook and in Facebook groups which were popular with university students. We followed up with posting the results on Instagram in order to reach a large audience. We then decided to create a poster which would outline the signs you have been spiked and emergency numbers to contact. We took the popular drink at Warwick University, a pint of purple, and used this on our poster. The pint of purple is being held by an image of ‘the claw’ from Toy Story. The claw is also a technique for covering your drink to avoid someone slipping something in. We believe this poster is funny, eye-catching and informative. Once we had the students’ attention, we hope they would then turn to look at the images of techniques to avoid drink spiking. 

Furthermore, we contacted the SU about putting the posters up in the SU toilets. However, they did not agree to this, and instead gave us other locations outside of the SU to put the posters up. Although the more people who see this poster the better, we wanted to target people who were in more of a drinking setting, as this is when drink spiking mostly occurs. We then turned to contacting clubs outside of the SU that were popular with Warwick students. We created a separate poster for clubs outside of the SU, which were more generalizable and did not include the image of the pint of purple, but of drinks typically seen in a club. The club Kasbah said they would like some of the posters to put up in the toilets of their club. This was a result!

Following this, we utilized the large reach that one of our members, social secretary of mixed hockey, has. During circle (a Warwick tradition in which people sit in a circle and drink copious amounts of alcohol) she had members of the club practice putting thumbs over bottles and holding hands over their drinks. She also took pictures of this which can be seen below.

Subsequently, we wanted to make bottle stoppers available to students. This was because of the large number of students (55.9%) who said they would use bottle stoppers if provided by their university. We contacted nightline, a student welfare service, who provide students with condoms, alarms and so on. However, we received disappointing news that they did not want to include bottle stoppers as part of what they offer to students. In addition to contacting nightline, we contacted the student paper The Boar about writing an article on drink spiking. The Boar is not only read by Warwick students, but also by the general public, and so we felt we should utilize this to spread further awareness. They said they were interested in having a member of their team write about drink spiking and publish our survey results. They are currently reviewing our survey to begin writing the piece!

Psychological and persuasion techniques

   

      MINDSPACE:

We implemented techniques from MINDSPACE (Dolan et al., 2012) in order to maximize the likelihood of changing our audience’s behaviour. Affect is known to be a major factor in behaviour change, as emotions play a major role in decision making - even more so than informative cues. In this way, we included surprising statistics about drink spiking to shock the audience about how common this issue is. This alerts the audience about the danger of drink spiking and makes them more likely to pay attention to the poster, and subsequently change their behaviour.

      ELABORATION-LIKELIHOOD MODEL:

We contacted the SU and a number of Leamington bars and pubs popular among students in order to reach our desired audience. We asked to put the posters up in the female toilet cubicles, thus reaching our target demographic. The posters were designed to be eye-catching with short pieces of information, as our audience would be more likely to pay attention to short pieces of information rather than large and complex paragraphs.

Thus, the approach we used was based on the elaboration-likelihood model (Petty & Cacioppo, 1986). In this model, there are 2 routes to persuasion: a peripheral route and a central route. We chose to use the peripheral route at first by making the poster colorful and using images as a way to draw in people’s attention. This is because our target audience would be unlikely to focus a large amount on a poster, thus the peripheral route is more appropriate. Moreover, the poster included a number of short bullet-points in order to deliver some information to the audience that would not require a great deal of focus. The images used were informative as they demonstrated a safer way for people to carry their drinks, decreasing the likelihood of spiking. So, these strategies utilized the peripheral route to persuasion and gave small pieces of important information with the use of bullet points and images.

      Evidence based on your research

Studies on drink spiking support our survey findings and confirm the vulnerability of the student population towards this threat. A survey conducted on over 6,000 students at 3 universities (USA) found that more than 1 in 3 students had reported being drugged- that is 462 students with 539 incidences being reported.

      Further study

If we had more time to conduct our intervention, we would make a few alterations and expand in a few ways. The first would be altering our survey and reaching out to a larger sample of people. Although we managed to receive responses from 410 participants, we would like to greatly expand this in future interventions. We would also like to add a few questions regarding participant characteristics. For example, finding out the exact age and gender of participants, and finding out the situations under which they or their friends were spiked. This would help us to see the kinds of people spikers target, and the kinds of situations in which you are most likely to be spiked. We would also have liked to create a # called #safercircle, which would bring societies and sports clubs together in the fight against drink spiking. Through this we would have clubs and societies post pictures of them holding hands over their drinks or bottles to Instagram with the hashtag #safercircle, to promote good habits to prevent drink spiking. Sports clubs also have a large reach across campus and so this would have only spread awareness further. We would also like to push services such as nightline and the SU to provide bottle stoppers or to run lectures on staying safe when drinking. We think there is already a great awareness of binge-drinking and taking drugs across campus, but we feel drink spiking is not necessarily talked about by the university as much. We would like to change this.

The results of our survey

   
   Evidence:

The SU rejected our idea of putting up the posters the in the SU toilets and instead offered us the less than ideal chance of putting them up around campus

However, Kasbah was more than happy to put the posters up in the toilets of their clubrooms!

Nightline rejected idea of offering bottle stoppers to students. This is something to consider if we were to carry on with our intervention. If nightline cannot provide bottle stoppers then where can university students access these without having to turn to the internet? The resources to avoid drink spiking are not readily available on campus and we believe this to be a flaw on the university's part. 

    References 

Lawson, S. (2003). Surrendering the night!: The seduction of victim blaming in drug and alcohol facilitated sexual assault prevention strategies. Women Against Violence: An Australian Feminist Journal, 13, 33-38.

Measham, F., & Brain, K. (2005). ‘Binge’ drinking, British alcohol policy and the new culture of intoxication. Crime, Media, Culture, 1(3), 262-283.

Sheard, L. (2011). ‘Anything could have happened’: Women, the night-time economy, alcohol and drink spiking. Sociology, 45(4), 619-633.

Swan, S. C., Lasky, N. V., Fisher, B. S., Woodbrown, V. D., Bonsu, J. E., Schramm, A. T., Warren, P. R., Coker, A. L., & Williams, C. M. (2017). Just a dare or unaware? Outcomes and motives of drugging (“drink spiking”) among students at three college campuses. Psychology of Violence, 7(2), 253.

Petty, R. E., & Cacioppo, J. T. (1984). The effects of involvement on responses to argument quantity and quality: Central and peripheral routes to persuasion. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 46, 69-81

Dolan, P., Hallsworth, M., Halpern, D., King, D., Metcalfe, R., & Vlaev, I. (2012). Influencing behaviour: The mindspace way. Journal of Economic Psychology, 33(1), 264-277