When did our children become hooked on gambling?
According to a new report, one in seven schoolchildren will place a bet this week. Here, Will Moffit and Cara Mcgoogan talk to the families most affected and ask: what more can be done to help?
A year ago today, 24-year-old Jack Ritchie sent his parents an email from Vietnam, saying “It’s happened again, I’m not coming back from this one”, attaching a handwritten suicide note.
“He was dead within half an hour of sending that,” says his father, Charles. “He’d been gambling pretty much constantly that day and crashed out.”
The promising young English teacher had spent years battling an addiction that had lured him into gambling his lunch money, aged 17 – and ended up costing him his life.
“We learnt about a year after he’d started that a really large group of his friends, sixth formers, would go to a local bookies in their lunch time and gamble on fixed odds betting terminals (FOBTS),” says his mother, Liz, 62, a former consultant psychotherapist with the NHS in Sheffield.
The Ritchies didn’t even know what FOBTS were, let alone that they are so addictive they’re called the “cocaine of gambling”, because players can win or lose up to £100 every 20 seconds.
“They were gambling dinner money,” says Charles, 63, a retired head of higher education research for the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills. “But one day, Jack won £500 twice on almost successive spins. We think that’s when his relationship with gambling changed. He thought he could win big.”
By the time Jack admitted to his parents that he had a problem, aged 18, he had gambled away all the money he had inherited from his grandmother.
“It was only a few thousand pounds, but he was distraught,” says Charles. “When he told us, he and I went around all the bookies so he could self-exclude. It was a humiliating experience for us both. He was bright, happy, cheerful, had lots of friends, and we were going into these shabby places full of an air of desperation; they weren’t fun places.”
They thought the problem was solved, but at Christmas after his first term at the University of Hull, where he studied history, Jack confessed he had gambled away his entire student loan.
His parents bought him exclusion software that prevented him going on gambling websites, but unbeknown to them, the issue continued – escalating further once he got a graduate job and access to loans and credit cards. One month, he lost around £5,000.
“For so many people, it’s not about losing huge amounts of money, it’s about the addiction and what it does to your mind,” says Liz. “This was a full-blown addiction, as if to heroin.”
And it’s an addiction that seems to be starting ever younger. More children have placed bets in the past week than drunk alcohol, smoked or taken drugs, according to an audit by the Gambling Commission, which also revealed that one in seven 11- to 16-year-olds bet regularly, staking on average, £16 a week. Those who start betting young are more likely to have issues as adults, says charity Gamcare.
As in Jack’s case, it is at university – where students have more time to kill and more borrowed money to spend than ever before – that the problem can seriously escalate. Gambling has never been easier, with online outlets available 24 hours a day, and once they have been accessed they bombard users with marketing prompts for “boosted” odds and “free bets”.
A 2017 survey by Youthsite, a research organisation for 16- to 30-yearolds, estimates that more than 100,000 students are in debt due to gambling, with one in four of those owing more than £10,000. Mark Potter, a youth worker at the gambling educational charity EPIC Risk Management, mentions a recent case at Hertfordshire University, where their hardship fund – an annual scheme to help students with financial difficulties – was gone in three months. “Around 90 per cent of it went to kids who had gambled away their loan and needed money,” he says.
Will Evans, a former business studies student at Northumbria University, began gambling on nights out that ended in the casino in his first year.
“I had just come out of a long-term relationship and felt quite lost. I turned to bookies and online stuff. I knew it was bad the day I went to a bookies and played blackjack on my own. I must have lost more than £600 that day.”
Betting shops soon gave way to online betting sprees, a habit that was not just financially damaging, but socially destructive: in his final year, he lost more than £12,000 in one night on online blackjack, hitting rock bottom in every which way. “My confidence had changed, my self-respect had gone, and my hope for a university degree.” He has now dropped out of university, and blocked himself from gambling sites.
The issue was highlighted in May by the NUS, who partnered with Gamban, an app that blocks gambling websites. It also coincided with the Government’s move to cut FOBT maximum stakes from £100 to £2 from April 2019 – a decision backed by Matt Zarb-cousin, Gamban’s founder, who lost £25,000 on FOBTS while at university.
Despite these efforts, many are concerned that not enough support is in place to tackle problem gambling at universities, and that the restrictions on FOBTS will only fuel a lucrative and deregulated online betting scene. “Everything is going to move online,” says Chris Anderson, Betfred regional manager. “That’s potentially more dangerous. There are no restrictions, you can play day and night, and you can guarantee on a weekend there’s going to be a lot of drunk people online.”
Angus Edwin, 25, a former economics student at Edinburgh University, did all of his gambling online, betting on football. “I think it comes a lot with boredom. When you lose, you bet more and if you win, you bet the winnings,” he says. As his third year came to a close, he lost his entire term’s loan in one sitting. “My parents have had to bail me out four times,” he says, “£1,000 every time.”
According to Potter, there “is a level of ignorance towards gambling in universities” that must be addressed.
“It’s still a taboo,” he says, “whereas drugs and alcohol are at the forefront of education.” And unlike drugs and alcohol, gambling addictions have no visible manifestation. “Gambling was always seen as a fun activity. It was only five years ago that it started being classified as a behavioural addiction,” he adds. “I don’t think many teachers or tutors know enough about gambling to deal with it.”
Dr Henrietta Bowden Jones, founder and director of the National Problem Gambling Clinic, is trying to change this. Having previously specialised in alcohol and drug addiction, she founded the clinic in 2008, turning a red-brick apartment in Fulham into the NHS’S first and only specialist gambling facility. Around 15 problem gamblers are referred there every week and recently “an endless stream” of them have been students who had dropped out of university. “That’s when we discussed this idea of having student workers,” she says.
For her, a radical, hands-on approach is required to tackle this influx of student gamblers. “Student mental health facilities don’t have the training to deal with gambling.”
Her vision is an NHS system, where students would talk to her and her staff via Skype and provide the specific psychological counselling they need. “Our treatment works,” she says. “Seventy-five per cent of the people who come here stop gambling.”
It all comes too late for Jack, who moved to Vietnam, where gambling is illegal, to try to escape his addiction, but was still targeted by British sites.
His parents set up Gambling With Lives with families and friends of men who have taken their own lives as a direct result of gambling and press the Government for greater regulation.
“It’s a common myth that gambling only affects people with depression or other addictions,” says Liz. “Gambling on these very addictive products actually causes suicidal thinking – and no one has warned parents.” Some names have been changed