Give Childhood a Chance and Keep Youth Drug Free!

When home is the most dangerous place – millions of children are growing up in families with alcohol problems, but society is largely failing them

During February International Blue Cross together with IOGT International,NACOA, and NACA have approached UNICEF to pay attention to children who are affected by addiction related harm.

When the global community adopted the Sustainable Development Goals in 2015, governments and the UN system committed themselves to an ambitious and promising agenda. Part of the commitment is a concerted effort to end all forms of violence against children.

And a concerted effort is urgently needed. Every five minutes, a child dies as a result of violence.

As the global community gears up to end violence against children, we are concerned with a group of children whose plight has remained invisible and largely ignored: children growing up in families with alcohol problems.

Making the invisible visible

For too long, these children have remained invisible, left on their own. As their parents cannot provide shelter and often basic support, also society is failing to protect and promote the rights of these children. Without hyperbole, all available evidence shows that the problem is massive:

• In the United States, mothers convicted of child abuse are 3 times more likely to be alcoholics and fathers are 10 times more likely to be alcoholics.
• More than 50% of all confirmed abuse reports and 75% of child deaths involve the use of alcohol or other drugs by a parent.
• In the European Union, there are at least 9 million children growing up with alcohol-addicted parents.
• In Australia ca. 1 million children live in households with at least one adult being addicted.
• There are 2.6 million children of school age living with parental alcohol problems in the UK alone.
• The number of children living in homes that are ravaged by alcohol problems sky-rockets considering the countries around the world that are currently not even measuring the issue.

Seen with the eyes of our children, the world we live in has an alcohol problem.”

Children growing up in families with alcohol problems are often exposed to physical, and/ or emotional violence and neglect, putting them at great risk:

1. They are five times more likely to develop an eating disorder.
2. They are three times more likely to commit suicide.
3. They are almost four times more likely to develop an alcohol use disorder themselves later on in life.

When home is the most dangerous place, society needs to step in and provide shelter and enabling environments that allow children to be children. This is why International Blue Cross needs your support to keep working in order to develop good policies and services that support children towards a world without negaive effects of subtance abuse.

Thank you for your continued support it truly makes a difference.