Violence against children by means of shaken baby syndrome: Criminal-sociological studies on the socio-economic state of suspects who made a confession

The shaken baby syndrome (SBS) is a common variant of the abusive head trauma in infants and toddlers, and it represents a particularly severe form of child abuse. Little is known about the socio-economic background of confessed perpetrators of SBS.The basis of the case collective, which was composed by using a multi-center approach including three institutes of legal medicine, were 72 expert reports in closed SBS cases on living infants and toddlers between 2006 and 2015. The actual study cohort comprises 16 suspects (4 women and 12 men), who had previously been identified during a comprehensive analysis of case-associated court files and who had confessed during the criminal proceeding.In the present study, a confession was predominantly made by suspects with a low state of education, with a low level of the working status, and with a low income. A low state of these three parameters basically corresponds to a low socio-economic state. Thus, only those people were willing to make a confession. It was striking that persons with a higher socio-economic state could not be found in the present study sample and, accordingly, those people did not make a confession.Therefore, the present data support the hypothesis that the willingness of making a confession to child abuse could be relatively small in higher social classes compared with persons having a lower socio-economic state. The aspects of the >> selective visibility of perpetrators << should be taken into account in preventive concepts.