There is a new advertising campaign that is targeting teenage gambling in Australia and shows how dangerous it can be. Although it had a noble goal, this campaign is being highly criticized and getting attention because of the provocative content of the advertisement. This campaign was launched this last week in Melbourne. The campaign uses a twelve year old child in order to send a message to people that Gambling is simply not a game. This ad is a part of the great number of satirical ads that are being pushed by the Victorian Responsible Gambling Foundation that aim to raise the awareness of people regarding teenage gambling and the dangers that accompany it. Of course, all licensed and regulated online gambling casinos and websites do not allow teenagers or underage children to gamble. On the other hand, some underage players have found ways in order to be able to gamble on unlicensed gambling sites.
Recent researches and studies showed that there are several ways that underage children can exploit in order to access these sites and gamble with real money. Besides this fact, the number of teen gamblers is increasing in Australia. According to the CEO of the Foundation, Serge Sard, Australian players are exposed to more than twenty-five million online gambling website ads every single week. He also added that with the popularity of smart phones and tablets, teenage children are spending more and more time online even when they are not at home. This is why they are exposed as much as adults to online gambling ads.
Online gambling is just one of the many parts of the problem. This is because teenagers can find a way to be engaged in offline gambling in underground card games among their friends with lottery tickets and scratch cards being the favorite games.
Data indicates that from 3 to 4 percent of all teenagers in Australia suffer from a gambling problem and that up to eighty percent of Australian teenagers have gotten involved in gambling at least one time during their lives. This is why Australian parents ought to know that their kids must have or have been betting real money on gambling games. There are many studies that have shown that problem gambling is such a prevalent problem among the teenagers, even more than adults. In adult males, 1% of the gamblers suffer from a gambling problem, on the other hand, 5.75 percent of teenage males suffer from problem gambling. As for women, 0.5% of adults suffer from a gambling problem while six times that number, 3.2% of female teenagers suffer from a gambling problem. The reason behind that, according to researchers, is that teenagers do not assess the risks of gambling and betting real money on games of luck.