Summarised by Centrist
US attorney Heather Kirkwood says some parents and caregivers are being wrongly accused of child abuse after doctors interpret unexplained injuries or medical findings as evidence of deliberate harm.
Her central argument is that some diagnoses previously associated with shaken baby syndrome, now commonly called abusive head trauma, have been treated with greater certainty than the scientific evidence supports.
Kirkwood is a former corporate attorney who began working on child abuse cases through pro bono litigation. She says her first such case involved a relative who had been convicted of harming his daughter but was later found to have no medical evidence of abuse.
Kirkwood says early shaken baby diagnoses were often based on a combination of subdural bleeding, retinal bleeding and brain injury, sometimes accompanied by fractures.
She argues that doctors historically inferred abuse from those findings even when there were no witnesses, confessions, external injuries or agreed evidence of the force required.
Kirkwood argues that several independent reviews have questioned the reliability of diagnosing abuse solely from medical findings.
She says more than 40 parents or caregivers convicted in shaken baby or abusive head trauma cases have since been exonerated.
She has worked on cases in the United States, Sweden, Australia and New Zealand and has contributed to six post-conviction outcomes involving alleged misdiagnosis of non-accidental injuries, including four full exonerations.
