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A journey into the shaken baby syndrome/abusive head trauma controversy

cambridgeblog.org

231–240 of 639 posts

Re: A journey into the shaken baby syndrome/abusive head trauma controversy

#231

This always scared me because I don't even know what counts as shaking. Can you accidentally shake a baby? Can my 2 year old daughter get shaken baby syndrome when older children on an inflatable castle with her jump and bounce too wild around her (she can't jump yet but loves the bouncing)? I've also often seen parents throw their children a bit in the air and then catch them. The children like it and laugh. I'm not…

I don't think you should worry too much. Abusive shaking really involves extreme forces. "Routine shaking" occurring during play is not expected to be harmful to healthy children. Games should be adapted to the age of children according to common sense.

The takeaway of biomechanics studies is basically that you should be much more careful about accidental head impacts on hard surfaces.

Re: A journey into the shaken baby syndrome/abusive head trauma controversy

#232
post #140

> It is the perfect combination of crap. I think that's being way too charitable. In a world where people are incarcerated on a scale unprecedented in all of human history, and where prosecutorial success is measured by number of scalps taken, the assumption that this is plain malice designed to let the state rob a few more individuals of their freedom makes much more sense than it all being just a big pile of incomp…

> the assumption that this is plain malice designed to let the state rob a few more individuals of their freedom makes much more sense. Of course it makes much more sense that there was a massive conspiracy across the medical, legal, prison industry, and press to put more people in prison. Rather than some doctors and legal professionals assuming SIDs was a simple explanation for a not very well understood medical ph…

[dead]

Re: A journey into the shaken baby syndrome/abusive head trauma controversy

#233
There is a problem with responsibility. Do you want to never let a perp go (i.e. jail innocent people in order to catch every guilty person) versus let some baddies slip through the net while not imprisoning innocent people. My own life found itself on the nexus, where I lost loved ones with a false accusation, but wasn't charged for it from (obvious) lack of evidence. Although the legal system worked somewhat, it was too late for me and my loved ones. The liars got away with it, and mission accomplished in removing me from the family.

Re: A journey into the shaken baby syndrome/abusive head trauma controversy

#235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why are you trying to play off your limited anecdotal evidence as universal? It has been the most important thing since the dawn of human civilization and continues to be so. What if someone just dropped off a random child at your doorstep and tells you you’re responsible for its upbringing now. I can understand people that want to adopt but that’s a conscious decision they made on their part.

> It has been the most important thing since the dawn of human civilization Technically this is appeal to tradition. Certainly it's true that our various worldly cultures are strongly influenced by this idea, but factually speaking... before paternity tests, there was literally no way to know for men if a child was their paternal child, especially in societies with very little physical attribute variance. Therefore ,…

It’s the same thing. If a man has sex with a woman and the government then drops off a foster child 9 months later, that’s no different than being expected to raise a child fathered by another man with the same woman.

Re: A journey into the shaken baby syndrome/abusive head trauma controversy

#236
post #184

The worst part here is: He spent months researching 500 medical papers to even realize this was a problem. No way in hell will a single defense lawyer get someone to be able to research enough to figure this out. As stated, how many people are in jail or lost their kids due to something that didn't actually happen. And how many people don't know that a minor bump in the head for a baby could be life threatening, but…

Similar case in Denmark/Romania where a baby was taken from his romanian parents because of the shaken baby syndrome, parents spent time in jail, but the hemorage continued over time so they had to concede it wasn't the shaken baby syndromd.

The trouble is: shaken baby syndrome is real and well documented. Because the crime is so abhorrent, people strongly want to believe the diagnostic tools to be much more sensitive and accurate than they really seem to be.

It's the classic "N guilty men" problem, aka Blackstone's ratio: if you risk putting one innocent person in jail, how many guilty people you need to catch to make it morally justifiable? 5, 10? 100?

You have to pick a number, or else no kind of criminal justice can exist.

Re: A journey into the shaken baby syndrome/abusive head trauma controversy

#237

This doesn’t surprise me. We have massive systemic issues in medical science and care delivery. - Medical science handles variation by simply assuming that large enough samples will average out variation. This loses a ton of information as the “average person” is a construct that almost certainly doesn’t exist. - news media on medical science glosses over all uncertainties in the name of clickbaity sensationalism. -…

I'm starting to see AI studies on the medical detection of child abuse, which unfortunately reproduce the same biases as the low-quality clinical data they are based on. An AI that would detect subdural and retinal hemorrhage without external signs of trauma with 99% accuracy would detect "child abuse with 99% accuracy" and would impress law enforcement and courts. However, it wouldn't be more reliable than an expert witness confidently asserting that these signs are almost always due to child abuse.

Re: A journey into the shaken baby syndrome/abusive head trauma controversy

#238

This always scared me because I don't even know what counts as shaking. Can you accidentally shake a baby? Can my 2 year old daughter get shaken baby syndrome when older children on an inflatable castle with her jump and bounce too wild around her (she can't jump yet but loves the bouncing)? I've also often seen parents throw their children a bit in the air and then catch them. The children like it and laugh. I'm not…

A) No, but no one can tell that you’re a dog on the internet. Further, dogs do not dispense reliable medical advice. The op is a press release for a textbook covering this topic in what looks like excruciating detail from a wide variety of angles. I doubt a superior citation exists.

B) Beyond that, my understanding is that once a child is past the infant phase where they cannot support their own head, they’re fine. Humans are not all that delicate. Bumps and falls are inevitable, I don’t see how we would have seen success as a species if the risk were outsized. And I guess we’ve been around for a while by now.

C) TFA does mention this a little but it is split across a wide gap and is not the focus. I pulled the two quotes I think are relevant below.

> And yet, although subdural and retinal hemorrhage may be caused by non-accidental trauma, especially when impact is involved, they simply are not specific for it: indeed, it has been demonstrated that a wide range of accidental events and medical conditions are plausible alternative causes. Particularly fragile infants may sustain severe head injuries following minor household falls. Others may suffer from genetic conditions, metabolic disorders, blood clotting abnormalities, or infections.

> On the other hand, there exist dozens of documented cases of witness reports of shaking, videotaped shakings, and spontaneous admissions of shaking, but without subdural and retinal hemorrhage. In fact, there is virtually no known case of a reliably-documented event of violent shaking without impact of a healthy baby resulting in isolated subdural and retinal hemorrhage (additional markers of trauma would be expected in such cases). In contrast, there have been numerous cases of videotaped or witnessed short falls resulting in these very medical findings, considered “impossible” by the shaking hypothesis.

So it’s like they say: it’s not the fall that gets you, it’s when you land.

Re: A journey into the shaken baby syndrome/abusive head trauma controversy

#239

> As a precautionary measure, the hospital followed mandatory reporting statutes and my wife and I temporarily lost custody of David. Thanks to our incredibly effective defense lawyer, we were cleared of all charges within two months, during which we stayed at the hospital 24/7 with David until we sorted out the legal procedures. Holy shit. Parents bring baby to ER ... results reveal that baby was shaken (article lat…

>parents lose custody for 2 months. Horror story. If you read the rest of the article, you will realize that this was the absolute happy path in that kind of situation. That's the real horror story: that the default path involves stuff like losing custody forever, incarceration, suicide, divorce etc.

Yes, after discovering hundreds of families living much worse situations, I consider myself as one of the lucky few. I'm grateful for that and this is why I can spend so much energy ensuring it doesn't affect too many other families in the future.

Re: A journey into the shaken baby syndrome/abusive head trauma controversy

#240
post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Amazing that bit about child welfare organisations fighting against the science, when clearly taking children away based on false accusations is clearly far worse for the child’s welfare, not to mention the parents’! This is just speculation, but I bet those groups (or their members) aren't always calmly and coolly trying to find the best policies protect the welfare of children. Instead they feel themselves on a k…

> they feel themselves on a kind of righteous moral crusade They see a lot of bad stuff which causes them to have a difficult time admitting that sometimes bad stuff just happens on it's own Reminds me of the police/detectives that "just know he did it" because they don't understand that people grieve differently. I really empathize with the people that don't have a meltdown and cry when they hear some horrific news.…

That actually happened to me, not with the police though, but with social workers. I explained the situation in a very calm, concise, and perhaps emotionally detached manner because this is just my personality. They wrote in their report that they found it strange that "I almost did not cry during the interview", which they said was the main reason they would recommend to put David in foster care. The guilt of knowing that I, with my personality, was responsible for losing his care, was devastating.

I also found this argument absurd: I was suspected of losing my temper on my child, and it's my calmness that was interpreted as a sign of danger!

It reminds me the Robert Roberson Texas death penalty case that John Grisham recently wrote about [1]: "He told hospital staff that she had fallen out of bed, but they didn’t believe him. They didn’t know he was autistic and decided he didn’t show the proper emotions given the dire situation."

[1] https://www.wsj.com/articles/texas-may-execute-a-man-based-o...

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