A new on gambling in B.C. shows an increase in teens making wagers, and it finds many young people are learning to gamble through online in-app purchases in video games.
"What's concerning is that move towards online (betting), which has more than doubled," said Annie Smith, executive director of the McCreary Centre Society, which prepares a report every five years based on the adolescent health survey 鈥� an anonymous questionnaire where nurses ask teens health-related questions.
In 2023, 38,277 youth completed the survey, with 59 out of 60 B.C. school districts participating. Researchers found that overall, youth admitting to having gambled within the past year increased from 18 to 20 per cent compared to 2018. While some types of in-person gambling were down, online gambling more than made up the difference.
"That's so much harder to regulate," Smith said. "A 12-year-old who walks into a casino, they're gonna get flagged, but online and in the privacy of their own home or their bedroom, it's much, much harder."
For the first time, the survey, which has been conducted since the 1990s, asked about gambling activity within video games. When taking that into account, the number of 12-to-18-year-old students who say they have gambled in the past year skyrocketed to 34 per cent.
This sort of gambling often involves in-app purchases for things such as "loot boxes" or new avatar "skins" to change the appearance of a player's online persona. Smith considers this to be gambling because players are taking a chance to get something valuable, but can also end up with something worthless.
"You're gonna get something, but it might not be something that you want," she said. "Or it might be something of great value. But of course, the odds of randomly getting something of great value are really, really slim."
The increase in sports betting is also notable, following broader trends since B.C. legalized single-game online wagering in 2021.
The number of youth betting on sports online was still relatively low compared to other types of gambling, but it doubled in the past year to four per cent. The report's authors found the more likely a young person is to play sports, the more likely they are to bet on sports. Those who gamble on sports were more likely to bet regularly, with 13 per cent betting daily.
"They can't go to a soccer game or a hockey arena or anywhere without seeing sports betting; they can't watch sports online or on TV without seeing sports betting," Smith said. "So it becomes really normalized."
Males were found to gamble at much higher rates than non-binary youth and females, with 47 per cent of males saying they had gambled in the past year, versus 29 per cent of non-binary youth and 20 per cent of females.
Problematic gaming was found to correlate strongly with feelings of loneliness and being bullied. The strongest overall predictor that youth would engage in gambling was found to be not feeling safe in their neighbourhood, having online friends they never met in person, and engaging in extreme sports every week.
The factors that correlated most with not gambling were found to be going offline at bedtime, planning to pursue post-secondary education, and having an adult to learn life skills from.
"There's the enforcement piece, but there's all the connection piece and the supervision piece, and the monitoring of time online," Smith said. "All those pieces kind of need to come together."