Rise in Drunken-Driving Arrests of Women Deplored

They're doing it in front of TV cameras in Orange County, in New York, in Atlanta, even in New Jersey. Real housewives, sipping chardonnay, talking about their loves, their losses, their lives.

They don't talk about the handcuffs too often, but when reality hits the road, more women than ever are being arrested for driving drunk.

"TV shows have made it look hip and cool to stay home and drink," Laura Dean-Moody, president of Mothers Against Drunk Driving, said Wednesday as she helped launch the annual Labor Day weekend crackdown.

It is neither hip nor cool, she pointed out, when women who have been drinking are involved in fatal accidents, which they are an average of about 2,000 times a year.

Although four times as many men as women are arrested nationwide for drunken driving, the number of women facing DUI charges increased by 29 percent during the decade that ended in 2007, a year when 162,493 women were arrested, according to FBI statistics. Arrests of men declined 7.5 percent during the same period.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/08/19/AR2009081903059.html