"On Saturday night at Cinema Village on East 12th Street in Manhattan,
I met Marine Sgt. Aaron Rasheed. He was up from Virginia with his wife
and three young children, including baby Elijah, who cried part-way
through the new documentary we were there to watch: “The Syndrome. I can’t blame him. The movie is about Shaken Baby Syndrome—a heinous crime we’ve all
heard of. Back in the fall, when Elijah was 3 weeks old, he suffered a
seizure. Sgt. Rasheed and his wife rushed him to the hospital. The baby
had two hematomas—blood on the brain (or at least it looked like that at
the time). How had he gotten them? The desperate parents had no idea. Tsk, tsk. They must be hiding something. Child Protective Services
swooped in and accused Rasheed of shaking the baby. Rasheed was floored.
He loved his son! He’d never do that! “But I think because I had served in Afghanistan,” Rasheed said, the
authorities assumed he must be suffering from Post-Traumatic Stress
Disorder, and further assumed he must be taking it out on his baby. All
three children were placed in a relative’s custody and Rasheed faced
trial. Frantic, he went online and tried to find any information he
could about Shaken Baby Syndrome. That’s where he found Susan Goldsmith, the researcher behind “The Syndrome.” A journalist for more than 20 years, specializing in child abuse, her
investigative reporting resulted in two new laws protecting children in
foster care. She was especially revolted by the idea of anyone who’d
shake a baby. I guess we all are. But the more she looked into this
crime, the more surprised she became. It turns out that the constellation of three symptoms that “prove” a
baby was shaken (a type of brain swelling, brain bleeding, and bleeding
in back of the eyes) can actually be caused by all sorts of other
problems, including genetic issues, birth trauma—even a fall off a
couch. And yet, over and over, distraught parents and caregivers with no
history of anything other than loving their babies have been accused of
shaking their kids to death, simply because their children presented
these symptoms—or other unexplained symptoms. To this day, about 250
parents and caregivers are prosecuted for this crime every year. “The Syndrome” tells the tale of how this new category of crime
appeared seemingly out of nowhere in the mid-1990s. Goldsmith found that
some of the doctors who had actively promoted the Satanic Panic of the
early ’90s, accusing daycare workers of things like sacrificing animals
in the classroom and raping the tots in Satanic rites, abandoned that
narrative when people started doubting its plausibility. In its wake, those doctors found a new horror to focus on: Shaken
Baby. As Goldsmith puts it, “They medicalized Satan.” Attention,
donations, and research money flooded in. But after Goldsmith’s film interviews parent after parent who brought
their ailing babies to the hospital only to find themselves accused of
the sickest, saddest crime possible, it turns to the heroes: doctors who
gradually started to question the syndrome.........Deborah Tuerkheimer, a Northwestern law professor interviewed in the
film, estimates there are 1,000 people in prison today for a shaken baby
crime they did not commit. Rasheed was almost one of them, but he was
found not guilty. The idea that the shaken baby diagnosis may be as unfounded as the
Satanic Panic does not sit well with the medical establishment. The
American Academy of Pediatrics issued a 14-page document criticizing
“The Syndrome.” Three different film festivals were threatened with
lawsuits simply for screening it.But the show goes on. “The Syndrome” is available on demand through
iTunes, Amazon, Time Warner Cable—almost everywhere. And Rasheed is
hosting a screening back home in Virginia. He knows firsthand how easy
it is to end up in the medical establishment or child protective
services prosecutor’s crosshairs. "It’s enough to leave anyone shaken."
http://www.timesledger.com/stories/2016/17/skenazy_2016_04_22_q.html