On Tuesday, the Council of Europe’s Pompidou Group launched a new project aiming to address the growing problem of online gambling and gaming among young people.
The Group created a 2024 policy paper on “strategies and regulatory options aimed at reducing risks and harms related to online gaming and online gambling.” The paper found that gambling and gaming products were deliberately made to be “as immersive and addictive as possible.”
The new project was launched at the start of a two-day conference in Rome. It seeks to counter these issues through policy and raise awareness among the 46 members of the Council of Europe.
Orsolya Kiraly, a researcher at the Eotvos Lorand University’s Institute of Psychology in Budapest, said that only a small number of adolescents experience the worst effects, which include addition-like symptoms, but in these rare cases the negative consequences are severe and include functional impairment.
Kiraly added that online gambling and gaming are of particular concern for children due to the impact it has on their development. This includes mental and physical issues such as family conflict, sleep disturbances, as well as poor eating and hygiene habits.
Citing research, Kiraly told the conference that gambling disorders could affect 26.4% of adolescents who are gambling online and 16.3% of those use sports betting.
The other front they are fighting on is video games, which are said to incorporate gambling-like features, such as “loot boxes.” These boxes contain unknown objects and can be bought within video games. The risk of addiction is higher among boys, while girls are found to have a higher likelihood of developing addiction-like disorders from social media, according to Kiraly.
However, there is also a problem among adults, and the distinct ways people of different ages deal with these difficulties make strategies harder to formulate.
Simona Pichini, director of the addiction center at Italy’s National Health Institute (ISS), told the conference that Italy’s national gambling hotline most often receives calls from adults, not young people. The other issue is that they often wait until the problem has become so bad, rather than at the beginning when they first identify they may have a problem. On the other hand, adolescents and young people often are unaware they may have a problem and, therefore, see no need to reach out for help.
