Not that I actually know the numbers here but:
At least 10,000 bar and door staff are to be trained to spot drink-spiking as part of plans to make it a specific offence punishable by prison.
The Home Office is to pay for the training from next month with 10,000 staff expected to complete it by the spring to tackle spiking. Polls show up to one in 10 women have been victims of the crime.
2.5 million women have had their drinks spiked? Just not one of those numbers I’m tempted to believe. I have actually seen someone spiked – there was a rash of this in Russia. But it makes you so falling down, flat out, dead drunk that it’s obvious.
So, anyone got an idea of how actually prevalent this is? Rather than how many exit in the minds of campaigners? Any NHS reports of people turning up with rohypnol in the system, that sort of things?
Whilst the claim is made that the Home office is paying for the training it probably isn’t. Training 10,000 people for £250,000 so £25 per head seems unlikely as any Government training course is going to be 3 or 4 hours minimum once you put in the fluff. This suggests that the training will comprise of the trainer coming to the pub or club and training a group of staff staff there, with the venue cost and wages for the employees time being met by the employer. This will of course be more that the £250,000 the Home Office is spending. The £250,000 will presumably be the costs of training the trainers and paying them to visit the venues and deliver the training…. plus admin. Given that 1,000 civil servants worked on the Rwanda plan we know government admin is inefficient so I’m guessing that the admin costs will be way more than the £250,000 headline figure but that money is already gone so even though it will be the most expensive part it doesn’t get counted.
My guess is that a lot of those women got blind drunk and did something stupid they regreted and find it easier to convince themselves that their drinks were spiked than admit their stupidity.
Having worked in pubs and clubs for many years, I can say that spinking is not a thing. The stats come from young girls getting stupidly drunk on shots, then blaming it on being spiked. I’ve never once seen a genuine case.
Even though it very rarely happens, it is of course already illegal, so no new laws are required. Bringing out a new law and being very vocal about it will encourage more young women to claim they were spiked after fifteen Jagerbombs though, so the stats will certainly go up
What Bucko said, plus it is of course credentialism again: before very long it’ll be illegal to work behind a bar unless you’ve done this “training”.
Give them a few more years, and bar-tending will be an all-graduate profession.
So, when some girlie claims “my drinks were spiked” and the NHS finds nothing, is that a positive or does it become a negative? Pretty sure they keep it as a positive, since that’s where the incentive lies and incentives matter.
I won’t say it’s exclusively this, since I think there are a few foreign types for whom drug assisted rape is a thing, but I suspect >95%++ of the time it is just women getting shitfaced and making up lies to cover their shame.
Those sugar loaded vodka things and shots of sambuca soon add up ladies.
BiND & Bucko – agreed. There was a pearl-clutching article in one of the UK rags a while back and the ‘victim’ stories, as retold by them or their mother were obviously a pack of lies. Especially no medico ever managed to find traces of whatever (apart from cheap shots) ailed them.
Would be roughly 7k spikings a day every day. Doesnt seem credible.
For reference there are about 20k hospital emergency admissions every day.
£250k sounds like a very very well funded online training website, and a load of pub workers ticking the quiz at the end boxes to get their downloadable “Compliance Certificate”. The answers generally handily written up somewhere nearby to ensure time value loss is minimised.
As is often the case, one needs to read this drivel carefully to catch the BS. Note: “up to 1 in 10”, so it could be anywhere from 1 in 10 to 1 in 10 million.
And, of course, if we really wanted to know how reliable this story is we’d need to know a wee bit about the poll they’re citing. It’s possible to design or run a poll in a way that will dramatically skew the results (for example, if a poll was based on people clicking on “have you been the victim of drink spiking?” we know that the numbers will overstate the victims by orders of magnitude).
Other than that…
“But it makes you so falling down, flat out, dead drunk that it’s obvious.”
Never gone drinking in the UK, so I’m relying on second-hand reports. This accords with descriptions I’ve read of pretty much every Friday and Saturday night in some towns though. So if accurate, I’m not sure how you tell.
On the other hand, occurrence of 1 in 10? Completely ridiculous. It fits in with the “1 in 5 have been raped” figure though, and probably comes from the same people.
Data.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2658214/
Quelle surprise. I suspect that ‘drink spiking’ is another example of a cross between an urban legend and a moral panic that is a uniquely convenient way for young women to explain behaviour which might otherwise attract social censure. There. Did I sugarcoat that enoughly?
llater,
llamas
On the subject of women getting blind drink then acting foolishly the current attempt to discredit yet another Trump nominee is a bit of a classic.
The lady accusing Pete Hegseth of rape is a married woman who allegedly was staying in the same hotel with her husband and kids when and where the alleged incident took place.
Stay classy Democrats.
@Llamas
It seems to be one of the great urban myths. There’s pretty well zero incidence of anyone been tested showing the substances in blood/urine. But a useful excuse, all the same.
The Home Office is to pay for the training from next month with 10,000 staff expected to complete it by the spring to tackle spiking.
Then they’re going have to find some, aren’t they?
So better now, not to buy any woman a drink. I’m all in favour of that. Save me a fortune. Going to be some horribly sober totty about, though. Few of them go out with any money.
This doesn’t advance the debate much, but this song has a certain relevance…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gbOTzuseHys
Enjoy!
Virtue concern issue.
Another example was the BBC reveal that the “can I speak to Angela” I.e supposed to be code for my date is making me feel unsafe, and the bar staff are then “trained”to loook after you i.e. make sure you get away, see you into a cab. Well lo and behold some campaigners pretended to be on a date and asked does Angela work here? Nope. No one of that name here was the most common response. Now BBC’s idea of journalism is tobof course present it as a corporate failure of ‘spoons or whoever but don’t dream of asking the patently obvious question, … is it even a good idea in the first place?
Probably because, where it was in action, women were using the “can I speak to Angela” thing as a means of walking out on a date and stiffing them for her drinks which the bar then has to eat.
Better to say “Sorry, no Angela here” and pretend the whole thing was a figment of the BBC’s fevered dreams (which was also probably true).
Hallowed Be,
“Another example was the BBC reveal that the “can I speak to Angela” I.e supposed to be code for my date is making me feel unsafe, and the bar staff are then “trained”to loook after you i.e. make sure you get away, see you into a cab. Well lo and behold some campaigners pretended to be on a date and asked does Angela work here? Nope. No one of that name here was the most common response. Now BBC’s idea of journalism is tobof course present it as a corporate failure of ‘spoons or whoever but don’t dream of asking the patently obvious question, … is it even a good idea in the first place?”
I do wonder sometimes about the whole women’s lib thing. Like, this is Wetherspoons doing the job that brothers and dads used to do. Like smash the patriarchy but then re-implement what it did in another form.
On a similar note, lots of these anti food industry programs and papers eg UPF are giving people an excuse for their own laziness and lack of will power. It’s not my fault Im fat, the food industry made me do it.
I think it does happen, but it’s not very often. I had this discussion with my OH, and I asked her if it had ever happened to her or someone she knew, and she said once to a friend at Uni 20 odd years ago. A group of girls had gone out, the first bar they went to, one of them got hit on by some bloke at the bar. Ten minutes later this girl can’t stand-up, but they’ve only had one drink and there’s no way she’s got totally hammered so quickly on the same stuff they’re all drinking. They took her home and she was violently ill. I made the point to her, it was one incident in 20 years, in all the hundreds of licensed premises she’s been in over that time.