The online survey of over 13,000 full-time students at a Perth university, described as the country’s first population-scale study of student drinking, revealed widespread impacts with fellow students and university infrastructure often on the receiving end.
But those who binged more than twice a week were most vulnerable to assault, aggression, property damage and other types of crime and inconvenience.
They were more than twice as likely to be sexually assaulted and three times as likely to get into serious arguments than those who binged less than once a month.
Teenage students were 14 per cent more likely than 20-25 year-olds to drink at hazardous levels, although both age groups recorded similar average scores against the World Health Organisation’s Alcohol Use Disorders Identification Test.
Universities saw the effects of alcohol abuse in property damage and student attrition, the researchers suggested.
They found the most prominent “secondhand” effect of heavy drinking was being obliged to “babysit” inebriated fellow students, followed by having study or sleep interrupted.
Far more serious impacts were also reported, with 1 per cent of the 7200 respondents reporting that they had been victims of sexual assaults in the past month alone.
The study found a “large discrepancy” between the genders, with half of young men drinking at hazardous levels compared to about a third of young women.
But the absence of earlier random studies made it impossible to confirm reports of a “convergence” of the gender gap.
The researchers found Australian and New Zealand students drank far more than their international counterparts, in line with a 2008 study which found regular heavy drinking by just 2 per cent of overseas students.
But they found that international students experienced disproportionate impacts from fellow students’ drinking.
Overseas students were a fifth more likely to have had their studying or sleep interrupted and almost twice as likely to have found vomit in their residences. They were more than twice as likely to have been sexually assaulted and over three times as likely to have been victims of other sorts of crime on campus.
The researchers concluded that hazardous alcohol use by undergraduates was of concern, but that there was insufficient Australian data.
They said their research should be replicated in other universities, particularly residential campuses.
The study was released last week by open access publisher BioMed Central.
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