A YOUNG LIFE WRECKED BY ONLINE GAMBLING

When old friends meet up, pretty soon they ask how each other’s children are getting on. That’s how it went last week when I saw someone I’d known since our own schooldays. But his face fell when I asked about his younger son, who’s now a teenager.

The boy had become hooked on online gambling. It had played havoc with his education and money given him for food had fed only his addiction. As this gambling was entirely online, the lad could play all night long. And he did; which meant he was shattered when he should have been doing his schoolwork.

This young man is highly intelligent and probably thought he could outwit what he saw as his online opponents.
However, he couldn’t seem to realise that the entities on the other side of the ‘game’ were almost certainly algorithms designed to extract money in the most psychologically alluring way. Hardly surprising, then, that his parents - successful people in their own fields - were in despair; at a loss what to do.

There was little consolation that I could offer, other than the observation that they were very far from alone. For increasingly the gambling industry has been targeting children. It is preying on the innocent, which threatens to blight a generation.
Recently, the Sunday Times reported that, belatedly, the Advertising Standards Authority is to ‘examine whether cartoon games on gambling websites, such as the Fairytale Legends series and Santa Paws, target children’. But is it not completely obvious that such titles are specifically designed to pull in children?

On the medium of TV, gambling ads are supposed to appear only after the 9pm watershed but how many teenagers are actually tucked up in bed by then? And even this apparent red line is made meaningless by the fact that there is an exemption from the watershed rule on gambling ads during live sports broadcasts. So live coverage of football matches on channels such as Sky and BT Sport are saturated with ads by gambling firms.

All the while, roughly half the teams in the Premiership turn their players into walking adverts for gambling by selling ‘shirt sponsorship’ to the betting firms.

How bizarre it is that firms selling cigarettes and booze are now excluded from any sort of sports sponsorship, while legislation passed under the Labour governments of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown opened up this market to the previously excluded gambling firms. Bizarre, not least because gambling addiction is known to be harder to shake off than addiction to cigarettes or booze.

One man has made it his mission to get the law to catch up with this pernicious social evil. Peter Gummer, now ennobled as Lord Chadlington, made his fortune in the field of advertising and promotion, and so, as he says, understands as well as anyone ‘the techniques which are being used to ‘normalise’ gambling among the young. Lord Chadlington funded an opinion poll of teenagers to ask them their viewings about betting advertising.

He did this because all the research published about ‘problem gambling’ appears to be funded wholly or partly by the industry itself.
The poll of more than 1 000 14 to 18-year-olds shows that these children had indeed been exposed to a bombardment of gambling ads chiefly through watching football on TV, and that two-thirds of them thought it excessive.

Three quarters thought the so-called ‘warnings’ in the ads were inadequate. More worryingly, when they were shown a Paddy Power ad now endlessly broadcast on TV, most said they felt it showed that gambling would be ‘fun’ to take up.
Many added that they felt the ad showed gambling would be ‘a good way to make money’. This is exactly the lie that the gambling firms want the public to believe.

Parents such as my old friend, can’t quite believe what has happened to his son - a once promising student now leading a vampiric nocturnal existence, transfixed not by blood but the illusory prospect of easy money. Almost the saddest thing is that the boy thinks he’s having fun. After all, that’s what the adverts tell him.

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