One morning in March 2019, Aude said goodbye to her two-month-old baby in a room at Necker Hospital in Paris. “I read him stories, then told him I was okay with him going. It was 7:15 p.m. when he left., she says on the verge of tears. Timothée suffered from shaken baby syndrome while being looked after by his father. You have to have a strong heart to watch this moving but very educational documentary. Every day, in France, a baby is a victim of this syndrome. In one out of ten cases, it will die. And if it survives, it will have serious sequelae (motor, visual, etc.) due to the irreversible destruction of multiple neurons.
What mechanism, then, leads to this violence?
Now engaged in the fight for the recognition of violence against toddlers, Aude Lafitte is the red thread of a film that wants to raise awareness of the extent of the phenomenon and analyze the mechanisms of this abuse. Even today, the shaken baby syndrome is associated with the exceptional cracking of an exhausted adult by the incessant crying of the child. Too simplistic. If this were the case, it is the mothers who should be mainly at the origin of the facts since they take care of it twice as much. But the figures say the opposite: 50% of the perpetrators of this violence are fathers, 20% companions of mothers, 20% nannies and only 10% mothers. And shaken babies are shaken on average ten times.
What mechanism, then, leads to this violence? “The arrival of a child changes the dynamics of a couplebelieves Olivier Coldefy, clinical psychologist with the courts. Men find it difficult to accept the loss of a certain form of conjugalability and peacefulness with their partner. » In a continuum with violence against women, the historian and essayist Lucile Peytavin, author of the “Cost of virility” (Anne Carrière editions, March 2021), points, for her part, “the education of boys, which involves the transmission of virile values”. Collages in memory of Timothée and other shaken babies have also appeared on the walls of cities, on the model of those paying tribute to the victims of feminicide.
Saturday January 28 at 9 p.m. on Public Sénat. Documentary by Anne Palmowski (2022). 52 mins. Followed by a debate presented by Rebecca Fitoussi in “Un monde en doc”. (Available in replay on the site of Public Senate).
