Million Pound Shot exposed Big Gambling’s tricks, but we’re about to endure their deepest deceit of all, “Safer Gambling Week”
Credit: Channel 4/Gary Moyes.
Coalition to End Gambling Ads
Following a cameo on Million Pound Shot, Will Prochaska argues ‘Safer Gambling Week’ is designed to falsely present the industry as caring while shifting blame to its victims for the harm it causes.
Two weeks after Bradley Walsh’s Million Pound Shot brought the grim reality of modern gambling into more than a million people’s living rooms, the gambling industry is pressing ahead with its ‘Safer Gambling Week’. It feels designed to tell us how much they care and encourages politicians to pose with pledge boards that not-so-subtly stigmatise people suffering from gambling harm.
Messages such as ‘Play Smart’ and ‘Remember – Friends and Family are More Important than Gambling’ will be all over social media for a week. We’re so grateful to the gambling companies for reminding us to think, and to value our friends and family more than pouring money into their bank accounts. It’s almost like gambling companies’ advertising, described as “inherently misleading”, might have tried to get us to do the opposite for the other 51 weeks of the year.
The brass neck award goes to this message: ‘Don’t be drawn into danger – use a licensed operator.’ It ignores that licensed operators represent an estimated 96% of the market and are clearly dangerous – bear in mind more than 600,000 adults have asked not to be sold their services as a way to protect themselves from them. What’s more it has been reported that the illegal market may be awash with game content developed by license holders, despite that being a breach of their license conditions.
Funny as it might be to poke holes in the obvious hypocrisy of Safer Gambling Week the tragic truth is that the ‘Responsible Gambling’ narrative it deploys could be contributing towards driving people to their deaths. New research from Loughborough University has suggested that one of the key themes behind gambling suicides is ‘the emphasis on individual responsibility within the “responsible gambling” narrative’, which participants in the study described as reinforcing self-blame and diverting attention from products and commercial practices.
The gambling companies have been told this for years, yet they continue to shift blame to their victims. Do they deny the findings of the research and assume they know better on the causes of gambling-related suicide, or do they not care that messages in Safer Gambling Week could be contributing to the body count? The Department of Health estimates there are up to 496 gambling related suicides a year in England.
And what of the Gambling Commission, whose statutory duty it is to protect people from harm? They chose not to attend a panel discussion of the new suicide research findings that I chaired and which included a senior coroner, and Professor Sir Louis Appleby, the Chair of the National Suicide Prevention Strategy Advisory Group.
However, their Executive Director did seem able to make time for a fireside chat with the CEO of the gambling lobbyists a couple of weeks later. The same CEO who told Parliament last year that gambling doesn’t cause any ‘social ills’.
To remedy the approach of the regulator will require legislation, as they are a creature of the Gambling Act. Fortunately though, there is hope that Safer Gambling Week and its Responsible Gambling narrative will soon be drowned out by public health messaging.
This year saw the demise of GambleAware, the leading industry funded ‘charitable’ proponent of ‘responsible gambling’ for over twenty years. In its place the Department of Health and Social Care is taking the reins on gambling risk messaging and within the next 18 months will deliver a new website providing public health advice on gambling, alongside a new messaging campaign on the risks of gambling.
If the reaction to Bradley Walsh’s Million Pound Shot is anything to go by, the public will celebrate the Department of Health’s work in this area. The most popular reform by far would be a comprehensive ban on gambling ads. Whisper it, but the Prime Minister called for such a policy when he was Mayor of Greater Manchester, so watch this space.
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