WORLD> America
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WORLD> America
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US women are drinking more, DUIs are up
(Agencies)
Updated: 2009-08-07 16:02 NEW YORK: It seemed too horrendous even to imagine. But the case of the mother who caused a deadly wrong-way crash while drunk and stoned is part of a disturbing trend: Women in the US are drinking more, and drunken-driving arrests among women are rising rapidly while falling among men. And some of those women, as in the New York case, are getting behind the wheel with kids in the back. Men still drink more than women and are responsible for more drunken-driving cases. But the gap is narrowing, and among the reasons cited are that women are feeling greater pressures at work and home, they are driving more, and they are behaving more recklessly. "Younger women feel more empowered, more equal to men, and have been beginning to exhibit the same uninhibited behaviors as men," said Chris Cochran of the California Office of Traffic Safety. Another possible reason cited for the rising arrests: Police are less likely to let women off the hook these days. Nationwide, the number of women arrested for driving under the influence of alcohol or drugs was 28.8 percent higher in 2007 than it was in 1998, while the number of men arrested was 7.5 percent lower, according to FBI figures that cover about 56 percent of the country. (Despite the incomplete sample, Alfred Blumstein, a Carnegie Mellon University criminologist, said the trend probably holds true for the country as a whole.)
In New York's Westchester County, where Diane Schuler's crash killed her and seven other people last month, the number of women arrested for drunken driving is up 2 percent this year, and officers said they are noticing more women with children in the back seat. "We realized for the last two to three years, the pattern of more female drivers, particularly mothers with kids in their cars, getting arrested for drunk driving," said Tom Meier, director of Drug Prevention and Stop DWI for the county. In one case there, a woman out clubbing with her teenage daughter was sent to prison for causing a wrong-way crash that killed her daughter's friend. Another woman was charged with driving drunk after witnesses said she had been drinking all day before going to pick up her children at school. Authorities said the children were scared during the ride, and once they got home, they jumped out of the car, ran to a neighbor's house and told an adult, who called police. The mother lay passed out in the car, and police said her blood alcohol level was 0.27 percent -- more than three times the legal limit. In California, based on the same FBI figures, women accounted for 18.8 percent of all DUI arrests in 2007, up from 13.5 percent in 1998, according to the California Office of Traffic Safety. Nearly 250 youngsters were killed in alcohol-related crashes in the US in 2007, and most of them were passengers in the car with the impaired driver, according to the National Highway Safety Administration. "Drunk drivers often carry their kids with them," said MADD's Hurley. "It's the ultimate form of child abuse." Arrests of drunken mothers with children in the car remain rare, but police officers can generally list a few. |
