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The legal drinking age in Australia, 18, coincides with the end of high school and the onset of emerging adulthood. While emerging adults who do drink most likely consumed their first alcoholic beverage well before the legal age, drinking as a social activity becomes developmentally normative and accepted after the end of high school. It is central to the social lives of many emerging adults. In most western countries, emerging adults drink more than the rest of the population, and heavy episodic or binge drinking behaviour is particularly prevalent in this age group. Some studies suggest that drinking serves some adaptive functions in the 20s, for example by facilitating the further development of self-regulation. On the whole, however, very frequent and binge drinking are not regarded as developmentally harmless. Not only can such drinking patterns negatively affect young people’s physical health and role functioning, they are associated with public problems like damage to property, offending, antisocial

behaviour, violence, and interpersonal harm (Aseltine Jr. & Gore, 2005).

Drinking and aggression

Alcohol intoxication is an immediate situational precipitator of violence. There is no doubt that violence is more likely to be perpetrated by people who are intoxicated, and to occur in settings where people are drinking (Farrington, 2007b; Kretschmar & Flannery, 2007). Many violent offenders, for example, report having been intoxicated when the incident occurred (Murdoch, Pihl, & Ross, 1990). In an analysis of the

circumstances surrounding violent crimes in Sweden, Wikström (1985) concluded that about three-quarters of offenders and about half of victims were drunk at the time violence occurred.

There is a very long history of research on the association between alcohol and aggression. Experimental research shows that alcohol has at least some causal effects on the aggressive behaviour of college students in laboratory settings, although the exact mechanisms are unclear (Bushman, 1997). According to Graham and Homel (2008), around 50 theorieshave been proposed to explain how alcohol affects aggressive behaviour. Many explanations focus on the detrimental impact of alcohol on cognitive functioning. For instance, alcohol may decrease the ability to complete complex cognitive operations, which can in turn lead to impulsive actions and decision-making. Alcohol acts as a stimulus as well as a sedative and is therefore associated with

increased arousal and heightened emotional reactivity, which may also affect cognitive performance (Giancola, 2000). For example, strong feelings of anger will inhibit a person’s ability to search widely and deeply for cognitive scripts to guide behaviour in conflict situations, increasing the likelihood that he or she will access the most readily available aggressive one (Huesmann, 1998). In sum, alcohol can produce a sort of ‘cognitive myopia’ that leads people to use violence because they fail to ‘think twice’ and consider the consequences of their actions. However, the pharmacological links between alcohol and violence are complicated, and most research suggests that any such effects of alcohol on aggression depend on interactions with contextual factors and characteristics of the individuals involved.

Particularly significant during the emerging adult years are the features of the establishments—pubs, bars and clubs—in which drinking typically occurs. Some drinking settings are more conducive to violence than others. Situational analyses show that physical factors such as crowding, heat, and noise are sometimes correlated with

greater numbers of violent incidents, but the factors most clearly implicated in alcohol- related aggression are features of the social environment. Many studies show that the overall level of intoxication of patrons, for instance, is positively associated with the frequency and severity of aggression. Moreover, very high levels of intoxication may be more likely in socially permissive environments. Permissive behavioural expectations, such as staff and patron tolerance for swearing and rowdiness correlate strongly with violence across several studies. Such conditions give rise to many situational

precipitators of violence, such as provocations, triggers to offend, and perceptions that low-level physical and sexual aggression will not be punished. Finally, permissive settings may increase the ease with which individuals can use alcohol as an excuse for behaviour that would be inappropriate in other settings. As illustrated by Ben and Dave’s story in the Introduction, these are settings in which minor incidents can escalate into violence, sometimes even drawing in those who are not particularly intoxicated or violence-prone.

It is generally accepted that alcohol-related aggression is likely to occur when there is a combination of the pharmacological effects of alcohol,immediate situational factors that facilitate violence, and a cultural context that tolerates alcohol-related aggression (Graham & Homel, 2008). Importantly, however, these factors do not necessarily cause violence. Many young people are never aggressive when drinking, no matter how much they drink, or where and with whom they choose to drink.An act of aggression also requires the presence of a person who is open to the possibility of being aggressive in that situation. Those who are more likely to be aggressive are also those most likely to drink heavily. Many of the child and adolescent predictors of heavy drinking in early adulthood are shared with predictors of violence in early adulthood and numerous studies confirm that antisocial behaviour in childhood and adolescence predicts heavy drinking in young adulthood (for example, Andersson, Mahoney,

Wennberg, Kuehlhorm, & Magnusson, 1999; Englund, Egeland, Oliva, & Collins, 2008; Harford & Muthén, 2000; Maggs, Patrick, & Feinstein, 2008; Wiesner, Kim, & Capaldi, 2005). The early adult drinking behaviour of former school bullies has not been specifically examined, but studies with high school-aged samples show that frequent excessive drinking is most common amongst adolescents classified as bullies (Forero, et al., 1999; Kaltiala-Heino, Rimpelä, Rantanen, & Rimpelä, 2000; Liang, et al., 2007). As adolescent drinking behaviour is one of the best predictors of early adult drinking behaviour (Schulenberg, Wadsworth, O'Malley, Bachman, & Johnston, 1996), it seems likely that school bullies will continue to drink at above average levels during emerging adulthood.

Overall, there is evidence that the association between drinking and aggression is partly spurious, and can to some extent be accounted for by other underlying factors, such as male gender or a general incapacity to regulate behaviour. However, some researchers argue that drinking might increase violence over and above the effect of these ‘third variables’. A recent study carried out by Felson and colleagues (2008) was specifically designed to disentangle these effects. The authors used data from US National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health to examine associations between adolescents’ (grades 9 to 12) self-reported involvement in physical fights and

prevalence, frequency and quantity of drinking. Results showed that drinkers were more likely to be violent while sober than those adolescents who did not drink, and this relationship was as strong as the total relationship between prevalence of drinking and any violence, sober or not. In other words, there was a degree of spuriousness in the association between prevalence of drinking and violence. Amongst adolescents who did drink, however, there was evidence that more frequent drinking had an additional independent effect on violence.

Most importantly, Felson and colleagues’ analyses showed that drinking had stronger effects on violence for more aggressive adolescents. When analyses were restricted to include only those adolescents who had been involved in at least one fight in the past year, those who had been involved in more fights were significantly more likely to have been drinking during the most recent violent incident than those who were less violence-prone, after controlling for frequency of drinking. Interestingly, these effects were no stronger for males than females. The implication of these findings is that, whatever the pharmacological or contextual mechanisms, alcohol is more likely to lead to violence for those who are already predisposed to behave aggressively.

Drinking and continuity of aggression

Longitudinal studies consistently demonstrate strong associations between antisocial behaviour and heavy drinking during adolescence and early adulthood

(Fergusson & Horwood, 2000; Huang, White, Kosterman, Catalano, & Hawkins, 2001). Several studies also show that adolescent drinking and substance use predict persistence of offending into adulthood (Farrington, 1995; Ouimet & Le Blanc, 1996; Stoolmiller & Blechman, 2005; White, Loeber, & Farrington, 2008). Generally speaking, delinquent adolescents who drink heavily and/or use drugs are much more likely to continue to be antisocial as young adults. Thus, drinking has long-term effects on adult antisocial behaviour. However, consistent with the effects reported by Felson and colleagues, some evidence suggests that heavy drinking can exert contemporaneous, short-term effects on emerging adult aggressive behaviour, beyond what would be expected based on individual propensities for violence. In other words, drinking may actively inhibit desistance during emerging adulthood itself, even after controlling for earlier drinking and antisocial behaviour. Hussong and colleagues (2004) argue that substance use, including drinking, acts as a ‘snare’ that hinders the normative process of ‘emerging desistance’ from antisocial behaviour in the transition to adulthood. Snares are

considered to be factors that actively retard desistance from antisocial behaviour, as opposed to ‘turning point’ factors such as marriage and stable employment that actively promote it.

Using data from male participants in the Dunedin study, the authors used latent trajectory modelling to show that the overall group-level decline in antisocial behaviour assessed at ages 18, 21 and 26, masked individual variability in patterns of desistance. That is, the slopes and intercepts of trajectories for some individuals deviated from the overall declining pattern, being steeper or shallower than group-level slope. Subsequent models were designed to determine whether this heterogeneity would be better

accounted for by the ‘launching’ effect of age 18 substance use, or by the

contemporaneous ‘ensnaring’ effect of substance use. Substance use included heavy drinking and marijuana use; I focus on findings for drinking. Consistent with findings from other longitudinal studies, greater alcohol use at 18 did predict above-population- level antisocial behaviour at 21 and 26. However, time-specific variations away from predicted trajectories were also related to contemporaneous heavy drinking. In other words, at times when young men were drinking more, they engaged in more antisocial behaviours than would be expected from their overall estimated trajectory. Of particular interest for the present study, this time-varying effect was strongest during emerging adulthood (ages 18 and 21). This suggests that alcohol posed the greatest risk for

antisocial behaviour during the post-high school years, when drinking generally reaches its peak for all young people.

Similar findings are reported in other longitudinal analyses. Morizot and Le Blanc (2007) also used latent trajectory modelling to examine distal and proximal factors associated with desistance from offending from mid-adolescence to age 41, using data from the Montreal Two-Samples Longitudinal study, a study of males arrested for delinquency in 1974 and 1975. Of interest were the long- and short-term

effects of a wide range of individual and contextual factors. Consistent with Hussong and colleagues’ findings, adolescent substance use (a combined measure of marijuana, hard drugs and alcohol abuse) predicted slower declines in criminal activity to age 41, but offending increased at times when men were using more substances even after accounting for the adolescent launching effect. Finally, Loeber, Pardini, Stouthamer- Loeber and Raine (2007) examined factors that differentiated males who were seriously delinquent during early adolescence (ages 13–16) but had desisted by late adolescence (ages 17–19) from those who maintained their antisocial behaviour. These males were members of the youngest cohort in the Pittsburgh Youth Study (PYS), a prospective longitudinal study of delinquency, substance youth and mental health comprising three cohorts of males (ca. 500 in each cohort) randomly selected from the first, fourth and seventh grades of Pittsburgh public schools in 1987. These boys were assessed biannually for three years, and yearly thereafter up to the mid-twenties for the oldest sample. The researchers examined multiple distal and concurrent risk and promotive factors. As expected, both groups of delinquent boys exhibited overall poorer

behavioural, health and occupational outcomes by age 19 than non-delinquent boys. However, boys who had desisted by age 19 were no more likely than boys who were never delinquent to be drinking heavily by this age. Persistently antisocial boys, on the other hand, were more likely to be drinking frequently and in large quantities.

In summary, these findings support the general association between drinking and violence/antisocial behaviour.Consistent with Felson and colleagues’ analyses, they show that drinking can maintain aggressive behaviour patterns in early adulthood over and above the effect of past behaviour, past drinking and other risk factors.At the end of this chapter I discuss the implications of these findings for the bullying –