INVESTIGATION: By Rachelle Money

tHE missed call on her mobile phone sends 15-year-old Rachel into a panic. She's worried the woman who has just tried to contact her will try and tempt her back into a life that nearly destroyed her and her family. Sitting in the offices of Moray Action Youth, where Rachel receives counselling for her drug and alcohol addiction, she turns to her support worker, Anne for help. "Should I call her?" she asks, gesturing with her phone. "No, stay strong," comes the reply. Rachel, clearly concerned, takes a deep breath and slips the mobile phone back into her bag.

At just 13, Rachel and her older brother would visit a local house in Elgin which was well-known to drug addicts and alcoholics. The woman who lived there would befriend children with the promise of drugs and drink. Police say there are adults like her in nearly every community in Scotland - preying on kids, exploiting them and introducing them to an adult life well beyond their years. In some cases, if men are involved, the exploitation can quickly degenerate into sexual abuse.

"I first took valium pills and liked it so much I was taking them most days. From then on everything went down the drain. This woman was an alcoholic so there was always drink in her house and I'd have some with her. Drinking alcohol has been the consistent thing throughout all this."

Her friends had deserted her and she attended just 13% of her third year at school. When she did go, pupils would call her "alkie" and "junkie", which alienated her further. Rachel soon found herself hooked, and her life began spiralling out of control.

"I once had an ambulance called on me because I drank so much Buckfast I had a kind of fit. I went to hospital another time but I was so out of it I can't remember what it was for. One time I stole a bottle of wine. I felt really bad doing it because I knew that wasn't the real me.

"I was getting so violent towards mum that two police vans turned up and four female officers came to the house. They searched me, cuffed me, and took me to the police station and put me in one of the cells to calm down.

"I just kept thinking, this is what it's going to be like when I go to jail. I really thought I would be in jail or dead by the time I was 16."

The number of referrals to the Scottish Children's Reporter on the grounds of drug and alcohol misuse has soared in the last decade from 880 to 1600. In Rachel's case, police and social services met her family and through the Children's Panel she was referred to Moray Youth Action.

Rachel has received counselling for her drug and alcohol dependency, and has a key worker and a guidance teacher at school who have helped get her life back on track. Her parents feel as though they have finally got their daughter back.

Rachel is not alone. The Sunday Herald has discovered that there are 1564 young people in Scotland, some as young as 11, currently undergoing counselling for alcohol dependency. Freedom of Information requests were sent to every local authority and NHS board.

Although not all the agencies held statistics, and some were unable to separate children with drug problems from children with drink problems, our investigation provides the most definitive snapshot of teen alcoholism in Scotland ever.

The figures we have uncovered also reveal that the number of young people in need of alcohol counselling has doubled since November 2006 when there were just 689 young people accessing help from alcohol addiction.

In 2006 Glasgow City Council had 55 young people go through counselling for alcohol misuse compared to 115 in 2008. NHS Grampian saw a similar increase from 10 to around 27 and NHS Highland's figures rose from two to 22.

Midlothian Council currently funds two services, Smashed and Connected, which are run by the Midlothian Young People's Advice Service (Mypas). They revealed that 37 young people aged 18 and under are receiving support for alcohol and drug misuse, including three 13-year-old children.

Paul Hunter, team leader at Mypas, said some youngsters are drinking ten times the volume of alcohol recommended for adult males.

"One of the things we do when young people come in is we ask them to do a diary to measure their consumption, and that allows us to assess their levels and patterns of drinking. What we found is that young people are often drinking ten times the weekly recommended units for adults."

For an adult male it is recommended that 21 units of alcohol per week is a safe amount. If children are drinking 210 units, this equates to seven bottles of spirits, such as vodka, every week.

Hunter explained why young people feel the need to drink: "Those young people who are using alcohol to increase confidence are more your experimenters.

But the young people who are using alcohol problematically are using it to cope. It's a coping mechanism to deal with something that's happening at school or home. We are also coming across quite a lot of young people who feel unloved and neglected."

So how are kids accessing all this booze? According to Hunter, the kids say - in teen-speak - that it's down to "randoms" - an adult walking past an off-licence who is happy to take money from children to buy them alcohol, or take a few cans of free beer in return.

When asked if Hunter felt that increasing the price of alcohol would help tackle underage drinking, he claimed it would help "price young people out of the market".

"We work with a number of young people who smoke cigarettes and they want to stop because it's so expensive. Possibly, if there was an emphasis on lower-strength products and an increase in cost then you would see more young people motivated to stop drinking."

Chief Inspector Alan Glendinning, of Dumfries and Galloway Police, said it is parents who need to take responsibility for drunk youngsters.

"We had a local resident call in to say that they had seen a parent dropping their children off, open up the boot of a car and lift out the children's carry-out for the night."

Glendinning said these claims were currently being investigated by police. He also revealed that police recently found a 15-year-old girl lying unconscious because of alcohol at 2.30pm.

He said: "Parents need to ask themselves, where is my child tonight? If they say they are staying at a friend's house, phone that person's house and get it verified."

Jack Law, chief executive of the charity Alcohol Focus Scotland, said that regulating the price and availability of alcohol was the most effective way to reduce alcohol consumption and its related harm.

"The more alcoholic - and therefore more potentially harmful - a drink is, the more expensive it should be. One of the reasons some teenagers drink so much is because cheap alcohol is so readily available."

Earlier this year the Scottish Government set out plans to address alcohol misuse in Scotland, which is thought to cost the country £2.25bn a year in extra services, including policing and hospital care, and lost production through ill-health and hangovers.

The Scottish government will invest £120 million over three years in treatment and support.

The development of more services seems key to addressing the problematic relationship between young people and alcohol. For Rachel, attending Moray Action Youth, run by Aberlour Children's Trust, has changed her life.

"Since coming here I got all my real friends back and some new ones too," she said.

Thanks to intensive counselling and support, Rachel has sat seven Standard Grade exams this year and hopes to enrol in a beauty therapy course at a local college.

SHE admits feeling tempted to go back to her old life, especially when the stresses of exams get too much, but has recognised she is now a changed person. "When I walk past the house that I used to go to I see new kids go in. They go in all clean and from good families and then a few weeks later you see them and they look like minxes, really dirty, and I think, that used to be me'. I don't ever want to go back to that."

Even though the woman who lured Rachel and other children into a life of addiction is well-known to local police, that missed phone call from her is still playing on Rachel's mind.

"That's really upset me. I want to know what she wants. I've not spoken to her in almost a year, why is she phoning me?

"I'm worried because she might ask me to go to her house again, she might want to tempt me back in.

"What do you think she wants? Should I phone her back?" she asks Anne again.

Like trying to coax someone away from a cliff-edge, Anne says: "No, that's what she wants, that's why she's phoned and hung up, it's so you'll call her back. You're strong you don't need to phone her."

***

I feel as though we're only scratching the surface'

"I was walking my dog one night and came across this young girl who was face down in a ditch. I thought she was dead. She had drunk so much she'd passed out and her friends had just left her. She was hypothermic because it was about -2C in the early hours of a Saturday morning. I had to ring the ambulance and watch them take her away. She was okay but it was a horrible thing to witness. That's when I knew something had to be done."

That experience prompted Lisa Goodman, a pupil support manager, to organise a meeting between police and youth workers. It was the first step towards the development of a ground-breaking initiative to tackle underage drinking in West Lothian. The multi-award-winning Operation Floorwalk, formerly known as Floorsweep, was launched in February 2007 by Lothian and Borders Police. Small teams of community police officers and youth workers walk the streets of Armadale, Livingston, Broxburn or Linlithgow every Friday night to identify drunk teens. Young people are picked up, taken to a police station and their parents contacted. They are then referred to West Lothian's Drug and Alcohol Action teams who can counsel children for up to eight weeks and offer on-going support.

Goodman, who works at Deans Community High School in Livingston, said: "When we go out on the streets I know which young people are the most vulnerable because I live and work in the area, and that helps the police.

"The kinds of concoctions we've found on kids is amazing. We've found vodka bottles with a packet of skittles dissolved in them. It's cheaper than a mixer and it means they aren't diluting the strength of the alcohol."

Goodman said that although the majority of children are binge drinkers and usually drink at the weekend, she has encountered children who are alcohol-dependent. "We've had four kids between the ages of 12 and 16 who have alcohol dependency issues, and there have been young people who have self-referred themselves into services.

"This impacts on their school attendance too. We've identified three 14-year-olds who got seriously drunk last night Thursday and haven't turned up for school today. Young people can find themselves excluded and that can make their drinking even more problematic."

Community Sergeant Gregor Forbes, who heads Operation Floorwalk, said the problem of alcoholism is endemic in Scotland. "I really feel like we're up against it. We are treating this seriously but I feel as though we're only scratching the surface. It's such a huge problem in our society. It's time for people to get away from the idea that the police can solve all these problems, we need the support of other agencies like the youth workers, drug and alcohol action teams and the community."

Eighteen months into Operation Floorwalk, Forbes published research on findings from interviews with 100 young people. He found 53% had drunk alcohol by the time they were 13, while that figure jumped to 88% by the time they turned 14.