2.5.1.2 Alcohol and Drug-Facilitated Sexual Assault

Although alcohol is not legally available to youth under the age of 16 in all but 21 countries, depending on the laws in your country, it can still be quite easy for someone underage to obtain it.

Alcohol is much more prevalent than some of the other drugs that can be used in drug-facilitated sexual assault.

People are more likely to accept alcohol from a stranger than they are to accept drugs.

For example, someone in a bar starting a conversation and offering to buy someone a drink is considered socially normal. Because it’s socially acceptable to do this, we are more willing to accept alcohol and trust that the person and the situation are okay.

Societal factors make it easier for a perpetrator to use alcohol to coerce someone and manipulate the situation to their benefit in order to have power over the survivor.

In certain contexts, there can be strong peer pressure to drink and become intoxicated. This is especially true among young people and people in university or campus environments.

It’s socially acceptable in many places to drink until you become intoxicated. For example, there are many jokes about what drunk people do, games to get drunk, and different methods to make people drink faster.

Many people do not see alcohol as a drug or believe that it’s dangerous. Because it’s widely advertised, many people think that it can’t be all that bad.

Many people who drink alcohol do not actually know how much one serving of alcohol is or how it looks. One serving of hard liquor fits in a shot glass.

It’s important to know and be aware of this because the drinks being served are sometimes much larger or have an unknown quantity of alcohol. Additionally, added sugar masks the taste of alcohol, making it difficult to determine how many servings are in one drink.

For example, someone has been given a large glass of an unknown alcoholic drink, and they drink it all. They may think that one glass equals one serving, while, in fact, the drink might have multiple servings.

If this is more than someone planned to drink that night, then they may become intoxicated quickly and not be fully aware of it.

Once they are intoxicated, a perpetrator can quickly isolate a survivor (e.g. by pretending to be taking care of them before leaving with the survivor for another location).

People who are overly intoxicated are not able to give consent. This is the type of manipulation that leads to drug-facilitated sexual assault.