14 DAY TRIAL // For many years, sociologists have believed that it's primarily men who behave aggressively towards infants, for example shaking them when they don't stop crying. But a new research found that women are just as likely to do this as well, but are far less inclined to admit it.
These are the conclusions of a new scientific study, which was conducted by experts at the University of Florida, in the United States. Researchers also learned that severe child injuries and deaths occur most often due to the actions of men.
For the new research, the team looked at 34 abusive head trauma cases that have been treated in the New York health system over the past decade or so. Of those children, 6 had died due to their injuries.
Details of the conclusion appear in the latest issue of the esteemed scientific journal Pediatrics. The children involved in the research were aged between one month and 3 years, the team explains.
“Through the years, I had noticed we had a lot of female perpetrators, so I decided to see if there were any differences, and there were,” explains the medical director of the UF Child Protection Team, Dr. Debra Esernio-Jenssen.
“Victims of males had more significant injuries – all six deaths were from male perpetrators. Another big difference is that males tended to confess and females didn’t,” the expert goes on to say.
In the new study, half of all head trauma cases affecting infants and toddlers were found to have been committed by women rather than men, which was a surprising finding. The experts did not expect to discover so many instances of women behaving poorly to their children.
“Mothers for centuries, probably, have been picking up and shaking infants,” Esernio-Jenssen explains.
“Although males are often more represented (in criminal cases), when you take anonymous phone calls, mothers say they shake their kids to get them to stop crying,” the investigator adds.
“If you do shake a baby hard enough, they do go to sleep; they become unconscious,” she says, adding that shaking the child causes the same damage on their brain as a major car collision does in a full-grown adult.
Some of the most common effects of shaking a baby include retinal hemorrhages, bleeding and swelling in the brain, shortness of breath and heart activity, and even coma. Long-term neurological problems often occur as a result.
“This is not playing, bouncing the baby on your knee or even tossing him up in the air. This is violent, severe shaking,” Esernio-Jenssen says. Her study found that nearly all of the children who were analyzed suffered from brain and retinal hemorrhages, PsychCentral reports.