Thread by @maizie333

Teaching children and young people about public health issues like gambling harms is challenging and involves engaging with complex concepts including the role of powerful vested interests🧵

It is important that education-based policies that seek to protect children and young people are open to scrutiny and that we consider carefully how they may favour corporate interests.

Yet this form of policy approach, which is often favoured and funded by the gambling industry, has received limited attention from the academic and public health communities.

We analysed three gambling industry-funded youth education programmes asking if and how they align with industry interests and policy preferences
sciencedirect.com/science/articl…

Our analysis goes beyond assessing the factual content of materials and seeks to understand their underlying assumptions and ideas about who is responsible for gambling harms and what needs to be done about them.

What we find is that there is a dominant understanding in these materials that it is individuals and the way they think or make choices that is to be understood as the main problem.

This deflects from the powerful forces that shape or constrain people’s choices and agency, including the gambling industry’s advanced marketing strategies and product designs.

It also overlooks the need for collective responsibility and comprehensive policy reform to address major social problems like gambling harms. This supports maintaining the current policy context which is placing both adults and children at risk.

Our findings are consistent with a large body of literature on the commercial determinants of health and the paper may be of interest to those working in this field. Comparative studies in other contexts and for other industries are needed. #CDOH

Educators, parents and policymakers need to be empowered to identify and critique the underlying values, ideas and assumptions that guide gambling education programmes and identify whose interests these ultimately serve.

Huge thanks to my brilliant co-authors Benjamin Hawkins and @petticrewmark

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