Comment by skjoldr
2 years ago
So what I got from this article is that it's a good idea to have a 24/7 CCTV coverage of all areas where a baby might be in case there might be a need to defend oneself from fradulent accusations by government agents. Oh well.
It's actually a fairly good idea, we think about it a lot. My highest hope is that technology soon reaches a point where it's cheap and convenient and not totally socially awkward to videotape the life of a baby 24/7. I feel like we're not totally there yet. The new Ray-Ban Meta can apparently record 60 seconds of video. What we need is 24/7 continuous videotaping to ensure that the exact moment when a baby collapses (and the hours before), and the caregiver calls the ER, is filmed.
A single case where we a video would prove that there was no shaking at this exact moment might help convince many doctors (not all, unfortunately).
Relatedly, this recent medical article [1] reports a case of an alleged short fall resulting in subdural and retinal hemorrhage. As usual, doctors did not believe in the story of the short fall (they assume a short fall can almost never cause them) and they concluded that the short fall was a cover-up for unadmitted abuse. The police was called and, surprise, the whole thing was filmed by CCTV. The videotape proved that the story of the short fall was entirely correct and the caregiver was exculpated.
Interestingly, the doctors did not conclude that their belief was wrong (short falls almost never cause subdural and retinal hemorrhage), but that it was an "outlier".
[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S10918...