Use Sexual Assault Awareness Month to Talk With Your Teen |
What Changes During Adolescence?
Find a therapist to support kids and teens
Sexual assault is never a victim's fault, regardless of the circumstances.
Teens need to understand that alcohol consumption dramatically increases the risk of sexual assault.
Kids deserve reassurance that parents will always love and support them, even when they make mistakes.
Talking to kids about sexual assault prevention can be intimidating, but it’s important. April is National Sexual Assault Awareness Month, and parents can use that as a conversation starter for initiating important discussions with their teenagers. While parents frequently may counsel adolescent and young adult children in standard safety strategies, discussing the relationship between sexual assault and substance use is also important.
As a pediatric emergency medicine physician, I see intoxicated college students in the pediatric emergency department regularly. Our first priority is to assess them for injuries, and then we monitor them until the alcohol wears off. But once they are sober and conversant, we also provide guidance around safe alcohol consumption and the risks associated with consumption beyond those levels.
Legally, teenagers and young adults shouldn’t be drinking alcohol before they are 21, and as a pediatrician, I advise restraint with alcohol consumption well into one’s 20s and beyond. Brain development continues long past childhood, into a person's mid to late 20s. The frontal cortex, which, among other things, plays an important role in higher-level thinking, doesn't complete development until around age 25. This is significant because alcohol exposure during adolescence can have a lasting impact on brain function and development and increase the risk of problematic alcohol use later in life.
That said, many college cultures and even some high school cultures center around alcohol consumption. These environments increase the risk of both underage drinking and binge drinking. Safe alcohol consumption for a woman is generally no more than one drink per day, and consuming four or more drinks within two hours qualifies as binge drinking. Safe alcohol consumption for men is no more than two drinks per day, and no more than five drinks in a single day. But the higher ends of these guidelines are still going to be too much for young adults. While I counsel kids on alcohol use generally, and I let them know that any alcohol use that concludes with a trip to the emergency department concerns me, I also share that my greatest concerns around their alcohol use aren’t actually about the drinking itself. Because while it is unquestionably true that alcohol exposure harms adolescent and young adult brains, it is the associated risks that worry me even more.
Alcohol relaxes and disinhibits us, which is a huge part of why people like it. But it also negatively affects our motor skills, reduces our reaction times, slows our recognition of danger, and quiets our internal alarm bells that are intended to keep us safe. Within that framework, it is hardly surprising that alcohol use increases the risk of all types of accidents. Sometimes, intoxicated kids just trip and stumble, but they also fall from great heights, sustain other types of significant injuries, and drown. Furthermore, alcohol intoxication increases aggression, obscures our awareness of potential danger, and limits our ability to respond effectively to unsafe situations even when we recognize them.
In addition, extensive research has demonstrated the multitude of ways in which alcohol is related to sexual assault among college students (Dowdall, 2013; White & Hingson, 2014). A review of the literature on this topic found that at least half of sexual victimization incidents involved alcohol use, and the majority of rapes of college women occur when the victim is too intoxicated to resist (Testa & Livingston, 2009). Another study found that almost 20 percent of undergraduate college women experienced sexual assault since entering college, with the most assaults occurring after women had voluntarily consumed alcohol (Krebs et al., 2009). Furthermore, binge drinking among college women has been found to prospectively increase the risk of subsequent rape (McCauley et al., 2010).
Never the Victim's Fault
Talking to kids about the relationship between sexual assault and alcohol use is important. But it is also crucial to emphasize, as part of these conversations, that victimization is never the victim’s fault and that intoxication does nothing to change that. Intoxication does not cause sexual assault; perpetrators do. A person who is drunk and unconscious should still be able to expect that no one will touch her, but unfortunately, that is not how such episodes always play out.
What Changes During Adolescence?
Find a therapist to support kids and teens
Intoxication increases the risk of becoming a victim of sexual assault in a few ways. Someone who is visibly intoxicated can become a target for individuals seeking someone vulnerable to prey upon. Then, additionally, intoxication makes us less likely to recognize worrisome situations and less able to successfully defend ourselves once danger has become clear. A young person who has been drinking may not notice that someone whom they don’t know well is behaving aggressively, or isolating them, or acting in a way that might ordinarily feel uncomfortable. And then even if an intoxicated person does notice that a situation doesn’t feel quite right, they may be less capable of extricating themselves from that predicament effectively.
Speaking to our children about the risks of substance use is important, but we need to expand those conversations to include discussion of the associated dangers, beyond the harms of just the substance use itself. However, the most important aspect of any conversation with kids providing anticipatory guidance about potentially high-risk behaviors is to emphasize that our children can come to us no matter what and can be reassured that we will help them without blame or shame. And then we need to follow through on that! We want our kids to be informed as they make decisions, but most importantly, we want our kids to know that we understand and expect that they will inevitably make mistakes, and regardless, we will always remain a safe place to land.
Dowdall, G. W. (2013). The role of alcohol abuse in college student victimization. In B. S. Fisher & J. J. Sloan III (Eds.), Campus Crime: Legal, Social, and Policy Perspectives (3rd ed., pp. 184–210). Charles C. Thomas Publisher.
White, A., & Hingson, R. (2014). The burden of alcohol use: Excessive alcohol consumption and related consequences among college students. Alcohol Research: Current Reviews, 35(2), 201–218.
Testa, M., & Livingston, J. A. (2009). Alcohol consumption and women's vulnerability to sexual victimization: Can reducing women's drinking prevent rape? Substance Use & Misuse, 44(9–10), 1349–1376.
Krebs, C. P., Lindquist, C. H., Warner, T. D., Fisher, B. S., & Martin, S. L. (2009). College women's experiences with physically forced, alcohol- or other drug-enabled, and drug-facilitated sexual assault before and since entering college. Journal of American College Health, 57(6), 639–649.
McCauley, J. L., Calhoun, K. S., & Gidycz, C. A. (2010). Binge drinking and rape: A prospective examination of college women with a history of previous sexual victimization. Journal of Interpersonal Violence, 25(9), 1655–1668.
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