ONCE society frowned upon women who went out and got drunk. They were expected to sit in the saloon bar sipping a Martini or a half of lager and lime while the men got slaughtered.

But the revolution in women’s lives means the next generation has already overtaken the boys in the drinking league. Teenage girls are now bigger binge drinkers than boys for the first time as more women turn to excessive consumption of alcohol, according to a study published yesterday.

It is not the only area of drinking culture where 15-year-old girls are ahead of boys in Britain. The girls beat boys in the number of times they have drunk alcohol in their lives and in how often they have been drunk in the past month.

Alcoholism is no longer confined to people over 40, and teenagers are arriving drunk at after-school youth projects. Alcohol-related liver damage among young people has increased dramatically.

Ian Gilmore, registrar of the Royal College of Physicians, said that it had once been unusual to see serious alcohol-related liver damage before the age of 40. “Now much more we are seeing people in their thirties or even in their twenties. A few years ago we had a patient at the age of 17 who had started drinking around the age of 12. She is now being assessed for a liver transplant,” he said.

The study of 2,000 teenagers aged 15 in 35 European countries found that binge drinking among girls had risen from 20 to 29 per cent between 1995 and 2003. In the same period teenage boys increased their binge drinking, defined as five units of alcohol in a row three times a month, from 24 per cent to 26 per cent, with a peak in 1999 of 33 per cent.

Martin Plant, who presented the European School Survey Project on Alcohol and other Drugs’s report, said: “Something has been going on since the late 1990s which is unprecedented. There has been an enormous increase in heavy drinking among young women.” He suggested that the rise in binge drinking among teenagers was linked to the emergence of a “ladette culture” among girls, greater freedom for women and less social disapproval of women getting drunk.

Mr Plant, Professor of Addiction Studies at the University of the West of England, criticised the Government, parents and the drinks industry for failing to tackle the problem.

In France 88 per cent of parents knew where their children were on a Saturday night but in the UK it was under 50 per cent. Professor Plant added: “Raising teenagers can be extremely tough, but my concern is that vast numbers of British parents seem to have given up.”

Professor Plant said the drinks industry should put its house in order. “We have completely feckless and irresponsible cheap drinks promotions. We need mandatory bans on them. They are bad for our society,” he said.

He attacked the Government’s alcohol harm reduction strategy for failing to have any targets and for relying on voluntary agreements with the industry. He forecast a rise in violence if pubs and clubs are allowed to stay open 24 hours.

The study also found that in addition to being among the heaviest drinkers in Europe, British teenagers are among the heaviest drug users: 23 per cent of boys and 16 per cent of girls had used cannabis in the past 30 days.

Caroline Flint, a junior Home Office minister, said that the Government’s alcohol harm reduction strategy set out a comprehensive programme of work to tackle alcohol-related problems, including underage and binge drinking.

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