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SYDNEY, Nov 19 (Reuters) Krystle Kelley's scarred face, slashed by an angry drunk woman with a broken glass, is the face of Australia's alcohol-fuelled wave of violence.
''My eyeball was cut in half ... right through the back of the retina. I am permanently blind in one eye and have severe scaring,'' Kelley, 21, told Reuters.
''My whole life has been turned upside down from the age of 21.
I can't work because I go to hospital every month to have several operations,'' she said.
''I spoke to two other people who had been 'glassed' and they suffer the same side effects. When they hear something break they are jumpy ... pretty much put their back against a wall, nightmares, sharp pains where they have actually been cut.'' Each weekend, Australian cities like Sydney are littered with unconscious, vomiting and fighting young drunks.
Binge drinking by young Australians has reached frightening levels, say police and hospital staff who struggle to stem the violence and are left to repair the wounds of victims.
''We are becoming a much more violent, aggressive society. We are becoming intolerant of anything that annoys us ... and hence road rage, parking rage, trolley rage at the supermarket,'' says Dr Gordon Fulde, head of the emergency department at St Vincent's Hospital in Sydney.
''We are assaulting people more viciously. The violence is very, very nasty. Weapons are also involved now and the closest weapon when drinking is a glass or bottle,'' says Fulde, who treats bloodied victims of drunken fights each weekend.
Australia's most populous state, New South Wales (NSW), which includes the nation's biggest city Sydney, recorded 21,000 incidents of alcohol-related violence in the past year, with the rate of violent incidents rising seven per cent annually.
Irish tourist David Keohane, 29, was almost bashed to death outside a Sydney pub in August and was flown home in a coma, while flowers were tied around a street pole outside a Bondi pub after an Irishman was left fighting for his life after a beating.
''It takes no more than a bump on the dance floor or a bump when people are passing outside the hotel for there to be an all-out war,'' Judge Paul Condon said in a 2008 case involving a female surf lifesaver who had an epileptic fit and bumped a woman at a club.
She was repeatedly kicked and stomped on by the woman.
In NSW there has been a 25 per cent rise in ''glassings'' in the past five years, when a drinker smashes a broken beer or wine glass into someone's face, causing major eye and facial injuries.
In 2003/04 there were 830 glassings in NSW, in 2007/08 there were 1,027, says the NSW Bureau of Crime Statistics and Research.
''This increase in assaults involving glasses just seems to have come out of nowhere,'' says Don Weatherburn, director of the bureau. ''Nobody really knows the explanation for the increase.'' Reports of glassings by both men and women drinkers is widespread, from Sydney, to the tropical northern city of Darwin, to Perth on the west coast. Several young women with permanent scars across their faces from glassings have appeared on TV news in recent months pleading for young Aussies to stop the violence.
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