Research into adolescent gambling conducted by the Department of Sociology of the Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK) reveals that 10 percent of student respondents had gambled online. That's a sharp increase from 2003 when the Chinese YMCA of Hong Kong found only 0.9 percent of students participated in online gambling. and a Federation of New Territories Youth found 2 percent had gambled online.

The CUHK research shows that 95 percent of so-called marginal, or at-risk youths had gambled. Twenty-eight percent of survey respondents said they had gambled for money in the 12 months prior to the survey. Meanwhile, activities of online gambling among student respondents, especially games of chance and offshore bookmaking, attracted the most attention.

"It is a noticeable trend that nowadays more adolescents are inclined to take part in online gambling without even realizing that they are gambling," says Ken K M Chan, chief officer of Children &Youth Services, of the Hong Kong Council of Social Service. "Offshore bookmaking is most dangerous to adolescents as it allows oral bets," he adds.

The survey encompassed 703 marginal adolescents and 4,734 students whose mean ages were 17.6 and 16.4 respectively. The study, undertaken from February, 2008, to January, 2010, classified the severity of gambling issues on a scale from "No gambling in the last 12 months," "Social gambling (scoring 0-1)", "At-risk gambling (scoring 2-3)" to "pathological gambling (scoring 4-12)". The standard is based on the DSM-IV-J gambling screening tool.

According to the survey, marginal youths are more likely to be problem gamblers (22 percent) compared with student respondents (1 percent). The gambling frequency is also higher among the marginal group than among student respondents. The most popular gambling activities among the marginal youths and students turned out to be almost the same: Card games, Mahjong, Dice games and Mark Six.

Generally speaking, pathological gamblers in both the marginal youth group and students are frequent drug abusers with greater mental health issues. Among the gambling-related problems that dogged both marginal youth and students, the first would be "after losing money gambling one day, they often return another day to chase the loss", according to the research.

Meanwhile, social workers said they find it hard to address problem gambling among youths, since it was hard to define gambling for them in the first place.

"We found it very hard to define gambling for the youths because it had already become a social activity that can be widely observed," said Chan Zhi Sing, convener of Network of District Outreaching Social Work Service (NDOSWS). "Most of the time, they (youths) don't think they were gambling, or they think it's not wrong to gamble, especially when they use the money earned on their own," he added.

Investing in the stock market, which is the most common gambling activity, along with Mark Six, betting on horse racing through the Hong Kong Jockey Club, playing Mahjong with families during festivals etc; all showed a negative affect on shaping the values of young people. Online gambling games such as card games and Mahjong are even harder to address.

Young gamblers rarely come to the social service council for help since few of them realize they already are in trouble over gambling. Staff of the NDOSWS take the initiative to help adolescents online.

"By searching the hot words among young gamblers online, we found them on gambling websites and made friends with them, making them feels like sharing their worries with friends instead of being 'taught' how to correct their behavior." said Chan.

China Daily

(HK Edition 06/29/2010 page1)