Comment by rossant

That's a very interesting and relevant comment. Maybe that happens in a few cases. However, the reality in my experience is much more complex (and interesting). This is basically an instance of a coerced internalized false confession, according to the classification by Saul Kassin [1].

Let's imagine a mother seeing her baby who suddenly stops breathing. Panicked, she gently takes her baby under the armpits: "Please wake up!". The baby is brought to the hospital, doctors find subdural and retinal hemorrhage, she is accused of shaking her baby.

At the police station, investigators are told by doctors that SBS is 100% certain, that the baby was shaken just before collapsing. They keep pressuring the mother, who swears there was no shaking, no trauma, no accident, no short fall, absolutely nothing. The baby just collapsed with no triggering event. This is a story that is repeated again and again by most parents and caregivers who are living this situation.

This is such a dramatic and emotional situation for parents and caregivers that many will actually doubt their own memory (that actually happened to me, briefly, and yet I never went through a tough police interrogation in custody). Anyway, innocent and sincere persons will actually try to find rational explanations. They will retrospectively try to find any sort of mild movement of the baby's head that could resemble shaking. Police officers will say what they're told (which is actually true): mild shaking will not cause this, only extremely violent ones will.

At one point during the interrogation, the idea will be brought up that, perhaps, the mother accidentally shook the baby after the collapse as a resuscitation attempt. In the end, it may well be the only rational explanation? The mother may even end up believing that she involuntarily harmed her own child while trying to save him, and that will be the charge brought by the prosecution that leads the mother to trial.

In reality, this gesture was likely to be far too mild to do any serious injury to the child. However, in this particular context, it may well be the only explanation that could be accepted by both the investigators and the defendant. In these cases, it's more likely that the child collapsed due to some undetected medical condition leading to a respiratory arrest (akin to what happens in SIDS).

I've seen this pattern over and over again. It has actually be well studied by psychologists in slightly more general contexts. The book contains 2 chapters (by Keith Findley, Richard Leo, Deborah Davis) on the extremely important issue of SBS confessions, as this is basically the main evidence of the diagnosis today.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_confession#Coerced_inter...