Definition: Shaken Baby Syndrome is a serious form of child abuse in which an adult violently shakes a baby or young child, leading to serious injury or death. Also known as Shaken Impact Syndrome.
SBS is an entirely preventable trauma. If no one physically shakes a child, then it will not incur the condition. Obviously. An estimated 1,200 to 1,400 children are injured or killed by shaking each year in the United States. That is a staggeringly large number.
In the past, the prevention method for SBS has always been creating public awareness. If you are upset because a baby will not stop crying, leave the room. It can continue to lay in it’s crib and cry. Leave the room and calm down instead of scrambling it’s rapidly forming brain. At least one in every four shaken babies will die from their injuries.
Be aware of what you are doing. Like Simon said, children are people, not property or accessories. Child abuse is a blatantly bad thing.
The majority of data suggests that most perpetrators of SBS are male. Why are men more likely to violently attack an infant? Are they less in control of their emotions or less nurturing?
In the past few years, data has suggested that women may be equally likely to abuse a child in such a manner. The discrepancy between such data is explained by attributing male abusers both greater strength and a greater tendency to confess. Physicians may even assume that a woman, with all of her stereotype attributed nurturing tendencies, to not have plausibly shaken her now upset baby.
Honestly, who really cares which gender is more of an abuser? It doesn’t have to be a male versus female issue. Men seem to be more likely to be serial killers. Men are also more likely to attempt suicide. There is no denying that plenty of violence happens at the hands of women, too.
Gender seems to play a large part in this abuse. I don’t find it feministic to point fingers, but rather to create a culture where both genders could be equally unlikely to do something horrendous.
