Inleiding
Ik wens jullie allemaal een mooie dag toe op deze donderdag 7 november 2024. Ook nu begin ik maar weer met een vrolijk liedje om de stemming er wat in te houden: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoRcpbsD-Vk Afgelopen dinsdag verstuurde ik een ´kennisparel´ over gokverslaving en geestelijke gezondheidsschade. Het toeval wil dat die middag het volgende onderzoek verscheen: Drie jaar legaal online gokken: Evaluatie van de Wet Kansspelen op afstand. En daar heb ik de bijgesloten ´kennisparel´ van vandaag over gemaakt. Ik voeg de samenvatting bij want het hoofdrapport in nogal omvangrijk. Geïnteresseerde lezers kunnen dat hoofdrapport downloaden vanaf onderstaande link.
De Wet kansspelen op afstand (koa) moest ervoor zorgen dat bestaande en toekomstige online gokkers naar verantwoorde, betrouwbare en controleerbare legale goksites zouden worden geleid. Maar de waarborgen die online gokspelaanbieders moeten bieden om kansspelverslaving en andere gokschade bij spelers te voorkomen, schieten tekort. De regulering heeft wel geleid tot veel nieuwe online gokkers, waaronder veel jongvolwassenen die extra risico lopen om door gokken in de problemen te komen. Dit blijkt uit de evaluatie van de Wet koa door Dialogic, die in opdracht van het WODC is uitgevoerd. Onderzoekers concluderen dat de wet en de uitvoering daarvan op belangrijke onderdelen niet voldoen en doen daarom een aantal urgente aanbevelingen.
Bron
Blom, Tessel, Max Boiten Melvin Hanswijk Sophia Stone Joost Crielaard & Frank Bongers (oktober 2024). Drie jaar legaal online gokken: Evaluatie van de Wet Kansspelen op afstand. Utrecht: Dialogic, 198 pp. https://repository.wodc.nl/handle/20.500.12832/3407 en https://dialogic.nl/wp-content/uploads/2024/11/Evaluatie-van-de-Wet-Koa.pdf
Summary
The policy assumes that a well-informed player will make the right choices and control his or her own gambling behaviour. However, the research shows that players are often insufficiently informed about both addiction risks and their own gambling behaviour. With an addictive product like gambling, this own responsibility is too much to ask of certain groups of players, such as young adults. Also, protective measures do not work as intended because they are not cross-provider. For example, players have to set mandatory limits in advance on how much time and money they can or want to spend on a gambling site. But because these limits must be set separately at each gambling site, this protection is lost once a player who runs into a limit continues gambling at another provider.
Providers of online gambling have a responsibility to monitor gambling behaviour and intervene if excessive gambling occurs. The evaluation shows that they fulfil this duty of care differently and often inadequately. The Kansspelautoriteit (Ksa) also previously reported that this duty of care fell short among providers. This raises the question of whether providers are the right parties to fulfil this duty of care. After all, they have a commercial interest in recruiting and retaining players. The Consumers’ Association also warned back in 2023 that in some respects providers encourage rather than prevent immoderate gaming behaviour. In addition, the current advertising rules for gambling do not completely prevent vulnerable people from seeing gambling advertisements.
An additional complication in terms of addiction prevention is that the koa Act requires providers to cooperate with addiction experts to shape addiction prevention policies, so that consumers are protected from the risks of online gambling in the best possible way. But this cooperation comes about in a very limited way. In fact, some of these experts are not keen on cooperating with the gambling sector. They want to preserve their (financial) independence and feel that too little has been done with their input in the past.
new players, previous research has shown. Some 7 out of 10 online gamblers surveyed said they started doing so after it became possible to gamble at licensed providers. Because of the lack of protection against gambling addiction, it is likely that some online gamblers incur gambling-related harm, such as debt, relationship problems or other personal suffering. A factor here is that relatively many young adults gamble online. This age group is at additional risk of losing control over their own gambling behaviour. What the ultimate effects of regulating online gambling on the number of people with gambling addiction will be is not yet clear. It often takes years for someone with a gambling addiction to seek help, but initial figures on the number of people seeking help from addiction centres already show a slight increase.
The evaluation is more positive about the reliability of online gambling and the prevention of fraud, but it mentions areas of concern there, too. For instance, information sharing to prevent match-fixing (gambling on manipulated sports matches) does not work well. A bottleneck in monitoring gambling sites or apps is that the Ksa can only monitor the gaming environment (that is what logged-in players see) to a limited extent. This is because the Ksa has objections to requiring its employees to log in with their own personal data and possibly gamble within the providers’ gaming environment. This is because the Ksa is not allowed to use false identities to create gaming accounts. It is also difficult for the Ksa to act against the illegal supply of online gambling at present, partly because these providers almost always operate from abroad and the Ksa is not authorised to shut down an illegal gambling site.
The review makes several recommendations that follow from the identified bottlenecks in the koa law and its implementation. The most urgent recommendations are:
- Prescribe duty of care centrally, rather than leaving it to the industry.
- Make player data available for independent research for addiction prevention.
- Increase the ksa’s tools to monitor licensed supply.
- Improve approach to counter illegal supply. Better enforcement of the illegal market makes illegal gambling sites less discoverable and less attractive. This creates room to regulate licensed offerings more strictly without players moving to illegal offerings.
- Shield vulnerable target groups – more than at present – from advertising, mailings and other types of promotional campaigns.
Finally, a key recommendation is to broaden the core objective of ‘preventing gambling addiction’ to ‘preventing gambling harm’. The reasoning is that problematic gambling has negative consequences other than addiction. The broader focus on gambling-related harm could ensure that all adverse consequences of gambling are better highlighted and can be prevented as much as possible.
Afsluitend
Tja wat moet ik nog toevoegen aan deze duidelijke samenvatting en conclusies? Het is mooi dat het ministerie van Justitie & Veiligheid (J&V) een dergelijke evaluatie laat verrichten. In feite laat je in de eigen ´beleidskeuken´ kijken. En die keuken scoort in dit geval een flinke onvoldoende. Beleidsmatig valt daar veel van te leren. Het is te hopen dat die lessen inderdaad geleerd worden en tot de noodzakelijke beleidswijzigingen zullen leiden.
Eerder verstuurde ik trouwens deze ´kennisparels´ over kansspelen en gokverslaving: 247;449;514;628;712; en 787, gratis te downloaden vanaf: https://prohic.nl/de-parels-van-jaap-de-waard/ De uitkomsten daarvan bevestigen in sterke mate de uitkomsten van de bijgesloten ´kennisparel´ van vandaag. Een extra argument om het gokbeleid in Nederland stevig aan te passen lijkt mij. Zeker wanneer het ministerie van J&V pretendeert op evidentie gebaseerd beleid te voeren lijkt mij dit een mooie testcase. We gaan het hopelijk zien want ik stuur al deze ´kennisparels´ niet voor de zwijnen.