‘Sexualised’ drinks ads ‘undermine’ anti-rape campaigns

Sexualised drinks advertising compromises the ability to counter sexual offending with anti-rape initiatives, academics from the UK’s University of Leicester have said.

The findings are from a study, led by Dr Clare Gunby from the University’s Department of Criminology, Anna Carline from Leicester Law School and Stuart Taylor of Liverpool John Moores University, which looked at the effectiveness of anti-rape campaigns in Liverpool’s bars and clubs.

Their paper Location, libation and leisure: An examination of the use of licensed venues to help challenge sexual violence has been published in Crime, Media, Culture: An International Journal.

The researchers analysed focus group discussions with 41 male students aged from 18-24.

The focus groups considered a rape prevention campaign giving advice to men, designed by Liverpool City Council with the study’s authors, where posters and beer mats were displayed in multiple youth-focused city centre bars and clubs, and across Student Unions in the city, for three months.

The campaign included strap lines ‘Can’t answer? Can’t consent – sex without consent is rape’ and ‘sex without consent is a crime’.

Researchers found that although participants in the focus group reacted well to the campaign message in discussions, the impact of the materials in bars and clubs “may have been hindered” due to alcohol consumption and “rendered invisible” against sexualised images.

“We conclude that the presence of sexually violent advertising within night-time economy venues, to promote club nights and alcoholic drinks, produces competing and conflicting narratives that undermine rape prevention work,” the report reads.

“We therefore call for increased regulation around such imagery and advertising. Failure to do so would leave an irreconcilable tension between venues simultaneously endorsing, and condoning, sexual offending.”

The findings come despite Advertising Standards Authority rules that marketing communications must not link alcohol with “seduction, sexual activity or sexual success”.

“Participants’ desire to have fun on nights out and to make determined efforts to disengage and ‘escape’ from the limits of the everyday could explain why so few participants were aware of the campaign – despite it being widely promoted,” Dr Gunby said.

“However, the most compelling explanation for their failure to notice the campaign was its perceived invisibility against sexualised drinks advertising and more explicitly violent advertising that links alcohol and intoxication with sexual offending. The latter form of advertising, we argue, undermines any competing rape prevention message.

“We would therefore like to see such advertising regulated to enable rape prevention work to be more visible, as well as to counter the role it plays in normalising sexual violence and recommend the development of a further Mandatory Licensing Condition that explicitly prohibits venue marketing from promoting or alluding to sexual violence.”

Taylor added: “There is a need to actively challenge practices employed by the alcohol industry which promote damaging behaviour as normative and acceptable.

“Unless the harms associated with such activities are acknowledged and addressed, the night-time economy will continue to be a site of disproportionate victimisation for young people.”

A 2016 police document showed that reports of rape across London’s bars, pubs and clubs increased 136%from April 2011 to March 2016.