Painful
inheritance
THE CHILDREN OF ALCOHOLICS
were ‘the innocent
victims of booze, who never ask for the pain they
suffer’, chair of the All Party Parliamentary Group
(APPG) on Children of Alcoholics, Liam Byrne MP, told
delegates at NACOA’s David Stafford Memorial Lecture.
All children of alcoholics grew up experiencing
insecurity, shame, guilt and worry, he said, as well as
‘the instinct to try to create order, build armour
plating, and never take it off’.
When his own father died he’d thought ‘finally
he’s in a place where no one can hurt him, and where
he can’t hurt himself’, he said. His father had been
idealistic and driven, eventually becoming leader of
Harlow council, but ‘as he rose up the ranks his
dependence on alcohol deepened’, particularly after
the death of his wife. ‘I struggled for a long time with
whether I should speak out,’ said Byrne, ‘with the
worry that I might be dishonouring my dad. But my
dad was the child of an alcoholic too.’
Many of the stories he’d heard since he took the
decision to speak out were ‘hard to listen to’, he said,
with people describing loneliness, abuse, violence, or
‘special occasions like birthdays and Christmas that
were more crisis than celebration’. However, these
were stories that people ‘need to hear about’, he
stressed. ‘If we can begin to break the silence and end
the stigma, then we can help to break the cycle for
those children experiencing a hell on earth.’ Children
of alcoholics were three times more likely to become
alcoholics themselves and three times more likely to
attempt suicide, he told the event.
The aim of the APPG, which launched in February,
was to ‘make a difference’, he said. ‘Public support is,
frankly, a shambles.’ No local authority had a specific
strategy in place to support the children of alcoholics,
he pointed out, while referral rates for treatment
varied widely between areas and many treatment
budgets were facing cuts. ‘We have to join
together and say that this is unacceptable.’
The group was calling for more investment in
helplines, as well as public information films
aimed at parents to ‘bring the message home of
how much damage they’re doing’, he said. ‘We
need to have an adult conversation about this.’
The APPG had also published a proposal for a
new law, the Children with Alcoholic Parents
(Support) Bill, which called for a national strategy as
well as the appointment of a minister with national
responsibility to support those affected and coordinate
services. The law would also require councils and the
NHS to set out the scale of the challenge in their local
area, and to publish details of their budgets for
support and treatment. This would form part of a
national league table ‘to show which local authorities
are doing good work, and which aren’t’, he said.
‘I had no idea that the support was as shambolic
as it is,’ he stated. ‘There’s a lot of people doing good
things, and a lot of effective models, but there’s
obviously a need to put in place more research, so we
can really see what works.’ The APPG was planning an
event that would allow those affected by the issues,
as well as charities and other organisations, to give
evidence about ‘what needs to change’, he said, with
the findings forming part of a manifesto to be taken
to the party conferences in the autumn.
The biggest challenge, however, remained ‘getting
it to the top of the list’, he said. ‘People are only really
waking up to the scale of the problem now. We’ve
deliberately set our initial campaign asks as something
it will be easy for the government to deliver, and that’s
why we’re asking for transparency about what’s going
on locally. Once you’ve got that comparable data it
becomes easy to say, “this needs to change”.’
The way that the conversation around mental
health had evolved over the last few years had
provided an inspiring example of what could be
achieved, he said, but there were clearly major
barriers to overcome. ‘When Sally Davies published
the new drinking guidelines you had this slightly
hysterical reaction in parts of the media, and we
really need to get over that.’ It was unlikely that the
current government would make ‘big changes’
around alcohol policy, he acknowledged, but smoking
campaigns were proof that a strategy framed around
the impact on children could have a genuine impact.
‘Every revolution starts with a few people in a
room,’ he said. ‘We couldn’t fix things for our parents,
but we can fix things for our children. Recovery is a
place we can all get to if we choose.’
DDN
NACOA’s (the
National
Association for
Children of
Alcoholics) annual
lecture at the House
of Commons set
out an action plan
to give the issue
the public profile
it deserves.
DDN reports
April 2016 |
drinkanddrugsnews
| 7
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‘I struggled for a long time
with whether I should
speak out... with the
worry that I might be
dishonouring my dad.
But my dad was the child
of an alcoholic too.’
LIam Byrne, mP
