Summary

Our research fellow Matt gives an overview on some of their key takeaways of the Bristol Gambling Harms conference.

Our research fellow Matt Smith recently attended the one-day international colloquium in Bristol on gambling harms organised by the hub for Gambling Harms based at the University of Bristol. The colloqium took place on an, eventually, sunny Autumnal day in October. In this post Matt gives a short overview of their key takeaways from the colloquium, the first of which being that they learnt colloquium is a fancy word for conference.

The conference bought together international academics alongside those working within organisations that seek to improve education and research on gambling harms and provide support to those negatively impacted by gambling. A clear theme of the day was that gambling is a huge industry with increasing amounts being spent and is deeply entrenched in society. For instance, the keynote Brianne Doura-Schawohl noted that gambling was foundational to the funding of settler-colonialism in the United States and that in the last year 67 million US Americans bet on the superbowl. However, despite gambling proliferating in recent years and bound-up with global flows of capital, the policy and regulatory landscape remains fragmented often with a mix of regional policies, national regulatory frameworks, and a reliance on self-regulation.

This can result in a lack of enforcement of self-regulation that was highlighted in the panel on ‘Sports and Gambling’ where the ‘industrial ecosystem’ between gambling companies, sponsorship, and football teams, has led to unprecedented levels of advertising across the opening weekend of the premier league. Maria Moxley (University of Bristol) stated that in 2023 there were 11,000 gambling adverts across various platforms over the opening weekend, and this has risen to 30,000 adverts for gambling in 2024.
The absence of regulation was also a key theme in a panel led by Sanya Burgess who through her journalistic work has investigated the emergence of crypto casinos and the role of online influencers in their promotion. The unregulated and often unlimited form of these casinos mean that those who gamble can and do lose large amounts of money in a very short period of time. This panel also brought to the forefront grey areas such as investment apps and gaming that have seen a ‘gamblification’ in their design with the proliferation of loot boxes in games and CFD (contract for difference) trading apps that promote frequent engagement.

The key takeaway, however, came from the panel on ‘Living with Gambling’ where Julie Martin and Matt Losing spoke about their personal experiences of living with gambling addition or with someone who has. Both speakers were incredibly candid, frank and open with their experiences and the painful difficulties involved in terms of financial, mental and relational stresses. The key role of organisation and groups that provide support was integral, and the importance of education of the acute and lifelong harms that gambling can cause for people.

The final panel of the day emphasised the importance of the international and interdisciplinary approach within research on gambling harms. Ben Haden from the Gambling Commission spoke about the necessity of expanding the evidence base and collecting better data and evidence to produce better outcomes. Personally, as a researcher who is influenced by the work of feminist policy analyst Carol Bacchi, I do have difficulties with ‘evidence-based’ approaches that, perhaps, romanticise the notion of objectivity and fail to recognise the always-already political nature of knowledge production. Specifically, It makes me think about how the threshold at which point data is deemed evidence is political, and when politically expedient research that was previously deemed evidence is suddenly found to not meet the new threshold. The final speaker Kate Bedford demonstrated the need for a critical and interdisciplinary approach through discussing the example of how the shift to cashless gambling was proposed by many in the UK as a means to safeguard those who gamble who are more at risk. This is because online cash transactions can be enable better monitoring of the individual gamblers expenditure. However, the move to cashless gambling has instead facilitated expenditure and made it more difficult for some – a seemingly unintentional consequence of regulation. In hindsight this example demonstrates the necessity of a critical approach to policy that centres the voices of those affected over and above those of the gambling industry. Overall a conference that provoked a great deal of thought, emotions, and conversations.