Drinking and DUIs an increasing trend among American women
Posted on:8/7/2009
Written By: Chris Robideaux
| American women are drinking more, and drunk driving arrests among women are rising rapidly, while men’s DUI rates are in decline. The trend may be indicative of worsening societal and family pressures such as unemployment, bankruptcy, divorce and foreclosure. |
American women are drinking more, and drunk driving arrests among women are rising rapidly, while men’s DUI rates are in decline. The trend may be indicative of worsening societal and family pressures such as unemployment, bankruptcy, divorce and foreclosure. Last month’s incidence of the wife and mother who caused a deadly wrong-way crash while drunk and stoned is part of a disturbing trend of increasing DUI offenders among women. And some of those women, as in the New York case, are getting behind the wheel with kids in the backseat.
Men still drink more than women and are responsible for more drunken-driving cases overall, although the gap is narrowing. Among the reasons cited are that women are feeling greater pressures at work and home, they are driving more, and they are behaving more and 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.)
"Women are picking up some of the dangerously bad habits of men," said Chuck Hurley, CEO of Mothers Against Drunk Driving . But a statement such as that would seem to negate women’s autonomy – especially since men are offending less in the DUI dept.
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 backseat.
"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.
Added up, all these figures point to a society that loves its booze, and desperately needs to change its overall lifestyle choices. With all the downsizing or bankrupt companies and families, coupled with the foreclosure crisis, and an unsure economic future – people are committing desperate acts. Perhaps more people at risk of DUI offense should turn to the natural highs which are available to them, before American roads become a veritable slaughterhouse.