NEW YORK – The case of the
mother who police say was drunk and stoned when she caused a deadly
one-way crash seems to be part of a disturbing trend: Women in the U.S.
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.)
"Women are picking up some of the dangerously bad habits of men," said
Chuck Hurley, CEO of Mothers Against Drunk Driving.
In
New York's Westchester County, where Diane Schuler's crash happened,
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.
The increase in arrests comes as women are drinking excessively more than in the past.
One federal study found that the number of women who reported abusing
alcohol (having at least four drinks in a day) rose from 1.5 percent to
2.6 percent over the 10-year period that ended in 2002. For women ages
30 to 44, Schuler's age group, the number more than doubled, from 1.5
percent to 3.3 percent.
The problem has caught the
attention of the federal government. The Transportation Department's
annual crackdown on drunken driving, which begins later this month,
will focus on women.
On Thursday, Daniel Schuler refused
to accept an autopsy report that showed his wife had the equivalent of
10 drinks and smoked marijuana within an hour of the wrong-way highway
crash that killed her and seven other people.
"I never saw her drunk since the day I met her," Daniel Schuler told reporters outside his attorney's office.
But a preliminary autopsy of Diane Schuler ruled out a stroke, heart
attack or aneurysm, Westchester County officials said. The medical
examiner said Thursday that he stood by his report that found her
blood-alcohol level was more than twice the state's legal limit, she
still had undigested alcohol in her stomach, and she had high levels of
the key ingredient in marijuana in her system.
Lisa A. Flam,
The Associated Press