Drinking and partying among young Muslim women: Exclusion in the context of a normalized youth drinking culture

BACKGROUND AND AIMS

Danish youth drinking culture is characterized by a very high level of alcohol consumption and a focus on intoxication. Young people with Muslim backgrounds drink markedly less, but their experiences with drinking and partying have been overlooked in research concerned with youth drinking. The aim of this paper is to investigate how young Danish Muslim women experience being part of a youth culture of intoxication and how they navigate through processes of exclusion related to drinking and partying. Special attention is paid to the intersections of different social positions relevant to these processes of exclusion in drinking and partying contexts.

METHODS

Twenty-five in-depth qualitative interviews were conducted with 32 young Danish Muslim women (mean age 23 years) residing mainly in big cities and surrounding areas. An intersectional case study design approach was applied to investigate how certain identities become salient at particular moments or within particular contexts.

RESULTS

The Danish normalized youth culture of intoxication had various consequences for our participants, of which two stand out. First, this culture of intoxication was excluding for young Muslim women and, furthermore, seemed to enhance exclusion based on ethnicity and religion, regardless of whether our participants drank alcohol or abstained. Second, the culture of intoxication actualized gendered ideals within the young women's families, and the potential for conflicts pertaining to drinking and partying could call into doubt their experiences of belonging to a local ethno-religious community.

DISCUSSION

Due to the Danish normalized youth culture of intoxication, young Muslim women are at risk of several exclusions: exclusion from central Danish youth contexts and, potentially, from their religious and cultural roots. We discuss the importance of including agency and strategic manoeuvring in intersectional approaches because these contribute to a better understanding of the complexity found in the results and, furthermore, they help to avoid the pitfalls of determinism and essentialism in studies of minorities. We also discuss how binge drinking prevention initiatives could focus not only on health warnings but also on the social consequences of exclusion.

Experiencing police violence and insults: narratives from ethnic minority men in Denmark

Young men living in socially deprived areas are more likely to be exposed to criminal activity and extraordinary policing measures. This article focuses on the narratives of police encounters told by ethnic minority young men living in a deprived neighbourhood in Denmark, defined by the Danish government as a 'ghetto'. In total, 76 young men and 6 young women (age 15 to 26) were interviewed between 2016 and 2017. The article focusses on their experiences of the police's use of force, interpreted as violence by the participants. We have categorized their experiences into three types: unnecessary use of force, inconsistent violence, and humiliation/insults. While police violence is often understood as primarily physical, we also show that in the young people's recollections of these incidences, issues of 'moral violence' becomes important. While not only specifically violating the body, this type of violence also affects the integrity and dignity of individuals. Our participants recounted forms of violence, which were extra-judicial in terms of physical use of force and they described how the police used indirect and degrading techniques of violence, some of which can be categorized as sexual harassment, embarrassment and public humiliation. From their perspectives, police power appeared unpredictable and illegible.

Conceptualizing ethnicity in alcohol and drug research: Epidemiology meets social theory

Since the 1990s, social scientists have rejected notions of ethnicity as something static and discrete, instead highlighting the context-dependent and fluid nature of multiple identities. In spite of these developments, researchers within the substance use fields continue to assess ethnic group categories in ways that suggest little critical reflection in terms of the validity of the measurements themselves, nor the social, bureaucratic, and political decisions shaping standard measures of ethnicity. This paper highlights these considerations, while also acknowledging the role of socially-delineated ethnic categorizations in documenting health inequities and social injustices. We call on researchers in alcohol and drugs research to critically appraise their use of ethnic categorizations, querying how to best measure ethnicity within their own studies in ways that are justified beyond simplified explanations of social convention and that "do no harm" in terms of perpetuating racism and obscuring the roots causes of social and health problems related to alcohol and drugs.

Prisoners' experiences of drug treatment and punishment in four Nordic countries

Aims

This article describes and analyses prisoners' experiences of drug treatment in prison in four Nordic countries: Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden. The article examines how prisoners experience drug treatment, control and sanctions as related to three main topics, namely motivation; the content of the measure and relations to staff; and control and sanctions.

Methods & DATA

– The article is based on data from twelve prisons, three in each of the four countries; 91 interviews with prisoners; and around six months of observation. The two main kinds of drug treatment measures are drug treatment units and day programmes.

Results

– Prisoners described several motives to participate in drug treatment measures: to leave drugs and crime; to renew relations with family and friends; to solve health problems; and to improve their prison conditions. Prisoners found that drug treatment measures offered possibilities to acquire new ways of being. Staff behaviour seemed to be more important to prisoners than the methods used, and some prisoners seemed more positive to staff involved with the drug treatment than to other staff. A surprising finding was the prisoners' limited critique of controls and sanctions. We see this as embedded in the situation of being a prisoner, and also in relation to contexts outside prison.

Conclusion

In discussing their experiences in the treatment units, prisoners are not so concerned about the rehabilitative features or the controls and sanctions. They evaluate their present situation in light of a future, which is their real concern. This is in line with a main task for staff, which is to prepare prisoners for release.

Insufficient access to harm reduction measures in prisons in 5 countries (PRIDE Europe): a shared European public health concern

Background

Prisoners constitute a high-risk population, particularly for infectious diseases. The aim of this study was to estimate the level of infectious risk in the prisons of five different European countries by measuring to what extent the prison system adheres to WHO/UNODC recommendations.

Methods

Following the methodology used in a previous French survey, a postal/electronic questionnaire was sent to all prisons in Austria, Belgium, Denmark and Italy to collect data on the availability of several recommended HIV-HCV prevention interventions and HBV vaccination for prisoners. A score was built to compare adherence to WHO/UNODC recommendations (considered a proxy of environmental infectious risk) in those 4 countries. It ranged from 0 (no adherence) to 12 (full adherence). A second score (0 to 9) was built to include data from a previous French survey, thereby creating a 5-country comparison.

Results

A majority of prisons answered in Austria (100 %), France (66 %) and Denmark (58 %), half in Belgium (50 %) and few in Italy (17 %), representing 100, 74, 89, 47 and 23 % coverage of the prison populations, respectively. Availability of prevention measures was low, with median adherence scores ranging from 3.5 to 4.5 at the national level. These results were confirmed when using the second score which included France in the inter-country comparison. Overall, the adherence score was inversely associated with prison overpopulation rates (p = 0.08).

Conclusions

Using a score of adherence to WHO/UNODC recommendations, the estimated environmental infectious risk remains extremely high in the prisons of the 5 European countries assessed. Public health strategies should be adjusted to comply with the principle of equivalence of care and prevention with the general community.

Screening Autoantibody Profiles in Systemic Rheumatic Disease with a Diagnostic Protein Microarray That Uses a Filtration-Assisted Nanodot Array Luminometric Immunoassay (NALIA)

Background: We developed a cost-efficient modular system for multiplex analysis of the multiple autoantibodies that characterize systemic rheumatoid diseases.

Methods: The nanodot array luminometric immunoassay (NALIA) system consists of conventional 96-well membrane-bottomed plates in which antigens or antibodies are adsorbed onto the underside of the membrane. Current arrays use a 5 × 5 format (25 dots/well), which allows 10 analytes to be measured in duplicate: double-stranded DNA (dsDNA), centromere protein B (CENP-B), PCNA, Sm, Sm ribonucleoprotein (Sm-RNP), U1-snRNP, Scl70, SSA/Ro, SSB/La, Jo-1, and controls. The test fluid, control sera, and subsequent reagents are drawn through the membrane. The captured analytes are quantified by monitoring chemiluminescence with a charge-coupled device (CCD) and analyzed with commercial array software.

Results: The assay can detect <20 × 103 IU/L of anti-dsDNA. The interwell CV was 10%–14%. There was an 83% concordance (κ = 0.56) between the NALIA results obtained for anti-dsDNA assayed by β-testing in a routine immunology diagnostic laboratory and the results obtained with a conventional ELISA reagent set. The concordance values for Ro, La, Sm, and RNP were 98% (κ, 0.92), 93% (κ, 0.41), 97% (κ, 0.62), and 97% (κ, 0.73), respectively.

Conclusion: The NALIA approach promises to provide a highly economical platform for a wide range of applications that require assays of multiple analytes. The degree of concordance of our results with a conventional reagent set was no less than that occurring between different commercial products. A sample of serum from a finger stick provides a volume sufficient to perform the array assay.