Abstract
The shaken baby syndrome (SBS) is a common variant of abusive head trauma (AHT) in infants and toddlers. Data on the legal outcome of such cases are still sparse. By means of a retrospective multi-center analysis, 72 cases of living children diagnosed with SBS/AHT from three German university institutes of legal medicine were identified. Forty-six of these cases with 68 accused individuals were available and could be evaluated with regard to basic data on the course of the criminal proceedings as well as the profile of the defendants (sub-divided into suspects, convicts, and confessed perpetrators). Criminal proceedings predominantly commenced with a complaint by the treating hospital (62%) and were found to be closed (without judgment) in 50% of the cases, mostly due to a “lack of sufficient suspicion.” Of the 23 cases with judgment, the court decided on acquittal in 4 cases (17%). Imprisonment was the most frequent sentence (16 out of 19 cases with conviction, 84%), whereby the sentence has been suspended on probation in 63% of the cases. Suspects and perpetrators were mostly male and derived from the close family environment of the injured children. All confessed perpetrators stated an “excessive demand” as the reason for the violent shaking of the child. The results of the present study are in line with data from other studies with other legal systems. As many criminal proceedings were closed and the 4 acquittals occurred because the perpetration could not be ascribed to a specific perpetrator, improving the forensic methods for such an unequivocal assignment would be desirable.
Highlights
Abusive head trauma (AHT) is predominantly encountered in infants and toddlers within their first 2 years of life [1, 2]
The present study revealed that most criminal proceedings commenced with a complaint by the treating hospital (62%)
This observation may be plausibly explained by the fact that the treating hospitals are usually the first institutions where the injury patterns lead to the suspicion of child abuse, especially because multi-disciplinary diagnostic measures are crucial for the diagnosis of shaken baby syndrome (SBS)/ AHT
Summary
Abusive head trauma (AHT) is predominantly encountered in infants and toddlers within their first 2 years of life [1, 2]. Data from European legal systems are sparse, and data from Germany are missing completely. Such data may help identify more promising starting points for prevention programs. The present study aimed at investigating the criminal proceedings of AHT cases of a 10-year period at German criminal courts, including analyses of the profiles of the defendants. All key facts as well as all demographic and forensically relevant data on both the criminal proceedings and the defendants were recorded. The latter were subdivided into suspects, convicts, and confessed perpetrators. The basic statistical functions like mean(x, ...) and median(x, na.rm = FALSE, ...) have been applied. Statistical significance has been established from p < 0.05
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