Shaken Baby Syndrome: How Certain Is the Diagnosis?

Meshel Laurie (0:03)

This is Australian True Crime with Meshel Laurie.

Few areas of forensic medicine are more sensitive or more consequential than the question of how a baby suffered a serious brain injury. Journalist Michael Bachelard explores the controversial science behind shaken baby syndrome in his podcast Diagnosing Murder, investigating cases where parents and carers have been accused of harming their children. Michael joins us on this episode to discuss what he found, the families involved in these cases, and the ongoing debate over how these devastating injuries should be understood. This is Australian True Crime. We acknowledge the traditional owners of the land on which this podcast is created, the Wurundjeri Woi Wurrung people of the Kulin Nation. A warning, this episode of the podcast contains graphic descriptions of violence.

I mean, this is such an important story that you're working on, but such a downer. Like I feel like we need to warn our listeners, perhaps more than ever before, that this is such hard stuff to talk about, right? But it's so important that we do talk about it. And you make the point in the first episode that you sort of a little bit worried that people are going to accuse you of trying to minimize violence against children or something like that. What made you decide to take this on?

Michael Bachelard (1:23)

Well, there was kind of two things that made me decide to take it on. One was, I was aware there was this rash of cases in 2018, 2019 in Victoria.

Three cases where young men, boyfriends or partners of women with children, sometimes the father, sometimes not, they were put in jail for shaking their babies. And these three happened kind of in quick succession. All of them, the expert evidence was a woman called Dr. Joe Tully from the Victorian Forensic Pediatric Medical Service, which is attached to the Royal Children's Hospital here. So they were very high profile. Then in 2021, there was a big appeal against one of those cases. It kind of put shaken baby syndrome, the diagnosis on trial. That appeal was lost by the appellant who was the prisoner, two to one.

And I've sort of thought from then and from conversations I was having with others, that this was a story that really needed a good hard look. But I didn't want to. I didn't want to be the guy who could be seen as defending baby killers. It's not how I imagined my journalistic career going.

Meshel Laurie (2:37)

It's a very, very touchy subject, isn't it? And I know people who work at the mortuary too, the Victorian Institute of Forensic Medicine, who have been involved in all of this and they're the same. It's like the incredibly touchy subject to bring up. These men are reviled in our community. The idea of a big, strong man shaking a baby and giving it catastrophic injuries, maybe killing it.

These are not sympathetic characters.

Michael Bachelard (3:04)

No, that's right. And the way they very often present, as I say, it's the boyfriend who's been left in charge of the baby, while the mother goes off to do shopping or whatever it is, and the baby ends up in this seizure or dying or dead.

There is not a lot of sympathy for them, and you can completely understand why.

Meshel Laurie (3:25)

Such a good idea, I think, to start the podcast with the family, whose baby survived the hospitalization. Because this is a scenario I'd never considered either. But because she showed some of the symptoms, we'll get into the symptoms that we're talking about. Some of the symptoms that have traditionally been associated with shaken baby syndrome.

She was removed from her lovely parents, put into foster care, and spent the first 18 months of her life in foster care, and seeing her parents only on supervised visitation at the library.

Michael Bachelard (3:58)

That's right.

That really was the thing that convinced me that I had to do this story was meeting this couple, this family.

Because they were involved in the child protection system, I had to give them names. So I've called them Kabir and Dipika. Kabir, the father, was accused of shaking little baby Dua, injuring her. She recovered fairly quickly. But by that stage, the trainer left the station, child protection became involved. Before they weren't allowed to leave hospital with Dua, they had to hand Dua over to a foster carer. And then for the next 18 months, as you say, it was visitations in a public place with a child protection official there watching over them.

Meshel Laurie (4:45)

Yeah, it's heartbreaking. You know, the grandparents flying over from India to see the baby and all of these family moments happening at the local library. And the mum, Dua's mum, talking about that awful night before she had to hand her baby over, still in the hospital. And she said she stayed up all night just looking at her baby, knowing that the following morning someone was going to take her. And this couple are so co-operative. I can't believe how much rage they don't express.