Is Shaken Baby Syndrome the New Satanic Panic? A New Doc Reveals The Same "Experts" Behind Both | L.A. Weekly

And as devil worshipping charges faded away in the early '90s, the three doctors began promoting a new danger: Shaken Baby Syndrome.

Satanic Ritual Abuse and Shaken Baby Syndrome are more similar than they sound. In both cases, the expert speak for the victim. The discredited Satanic Ritual Abuse cases proved that adults were able to pressure children to swear to all sorts of falsehoods. (One child identified Chuck Norris as his abuser.) The infants and toddlers who are alleged victims of Shaken Baby Syndrome are either dead, or too young to explain what happened. Thus a doctor's educated opinion becomes crucial—even if that doctor is adhering to incorrect “proof” of abuse.

Northwestern University Law Professor Deborah Tuerkheimer estimates that approximately 95 percent of defendants are found guilty once formally accused of maiming or killing babies through violent shaking, and that 1,000 innocent people may be in prison right now. Public belief in Shaken Baby Syndrome is so strong that Congress has long deemed the third week of April National Shaken Baby Awareness Week, and 18 states require hospitals to instruct new parents about the threat to infants from Shaken Baby Syndrome.

In The Syndrome, Goldsmith reveals that the doctors who frothed up Satanic Panic moved on to shape the next crisis. Chadwick, Reece and Jenny have all served as advisors to, or on the board of directors of, the National Center on Shaken Baby Syndrome in Farmington, Utah. They've defined new medical terminology in medical books which they've promoted to doctors, hospitals, and law enforcers. With hundreds of doctors following their lead, Goldsmith's documentary argues, the three helped trigger a surge of Shaken Baby Syndrome prosecutions — convictions now increasingly discredited by multiple media investigations, outspoken scientists and doctors, and attorney-led innocence projects that seek to free condemned baby shakers from U.S. prisons.

“When I put it all together, it was like being electrocuted,” says Goldsmith. “It's pretty damning.”

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The Syndrome interviews several medical experts who openly dispute the once-undisputed Shaken Baby Syndrome theory. Three major skeptics are Dr. Patrick Barnes of Stanford, who once believed it and now testifies in court against it, Dr. Ronald Uscinski of Georgetown who decries the hysteria as “pure Hell,” and pathologist Dr. John Plunkett, who tested bio-mechanical dummies to determine how much shaking was needed to scramble the brains of an infant or toddler.

Plunkett's findings have sparked a growing acceptance that the thin science underlying Shaken Baby Syndrome theory is wrong. For one, the three hidden symptoms such as blood behind the eyes can't be created without causing whiplash to the neck. Yet, The Syndrome points out that there has never been any serious neck damage in any of the Shaken Baby Syndrome cases, according to records from hundreds of prosecutions.


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It's important to pin down exactly what Plunkett and the other experts do and don't believe. They do believe that child abuse exists. They do believe that shaking babies is injurious. They don't believe that the definition and diagnosis of Shaken Baby Syndrome is accurate or useful. And they don't believe that everyone convicted of it is guilty, or got a fair trial in court or the media.

Dr. Jenny admits during a lecture in the documentary that “the assumptions we're making really cannot be validated at this time by the scientific literature.” Adds Chadwick, “Let's let it be controversial for awhile — until we find better data.”

Is Shaken Baby Syndrome the New Satanic Panic? A New Doc Reveals The Same "Experts" Behind Both | L.A. Weekly