A victim of shaken baby syndrome, Baptiste has lifelong scars from this abuse that kills or incapacitates more than 400 babies a year. The State has launched a campaign to raise awareness of this scourge.
“We would never have thought that our baby could be in danger at his nanny’s,” explains Elise. With Guillaume, her husband, they had confidence in this approved maternal assistant, warm to the point of offering coffee at the end of the day. “When she called me at work without explaining anything to me, remembers Elise, I rushed to her house. Baptiste, 6 months old, was in cardiopulmonary arrest in the hands of firefighters. A wrong way, according to the nanny. But doctors diagnosed brain damage typical of the shaken baby. They made a report to the public prosecutor. Baptiste was still in a coma in the hospital. We have heard without hearing. Our priority was that our son survive…”
For a week, Baptiste remains in a coma. Over the three weeks of hospitalization, he slowly recovers his faculties, one by one, a random process. “We didn’t even know if he would walk and, at first, he was blind…”, still trembles his mother. In the meantime, the parents are obeying orders not to communicate with the nanny anymore, but it’s difficult.
“The leaders are always a trustworthy person, who minimizes or denies the violence”
“Guillaume and I were completely in denial, you can’t believe it’s possible to hurt a child… And don’t talk to me about a fit of anger! Shaken Baby Syndrome comes from brutal, repeated and voluntary gestures. The baby’s brain hits his skull. For our son, the expertise revealed older lesions”, specifies Elise.
The mother is now supporting the Stop Shaken Baby association, and would like to share this basic advice to parents: “When a baby cries, we put him safely in his bed and we go to breathe in the next room!” Baptiste saved, the legal trial begins. “We found the strength to file a complaint by coming to our senses a little at home, a month after the events, in November 2012. We were far from imagining that the trial would only take place in 2018!”, Says Elise, who discusses on forums with parents.
“The nanny never acknowledged the facts, even at trial, multiplying the counter-expertise…”
She discovers other cases where the nanny is guilty, but sometimes it is one of the parents, the father, the stepfather, or even the mother. Always a trustworthy person, who minimizes or denies the violence. “The nanny never admitted the facts, even at trial, multiplying the counter-expertise which added to the slowness of justice, a long ordeal”, sighs Elise.
Meanwhile, Elise goes on medical consultations for Baptiste: orthoptist, speech therapist… Today, the dynamic little boy aged 10 and educated in CM1 fights like a lion to progress slowly, but he encounters fine motor problems at school, runs “like a robot” and suffers from strabismus, which earned him a “Accompanying student with disabilities” (AESH) at school.
She was given a three-year suspended prison sentence and a life ban.
Baptiste knows what happened to him. He was already grown up when “the lady was punished”, a milestone for the whole family. At the trial, the nanny kept a low profile, while denying it. “She was given a three-year suspended prison sentence, which is never enough for the victims, and a life ban from practicing, my satisfaction. It was still me who had to intervene after our Complaint for her to be suspended before the trial! She was still having babies!” Storms Elise, who was first told that it was not judged.
As a precautionary principle, she was finally listened to. The couple has never met this woman again: “We don’t want to! We put a few kilometers between her and us, and today we are focusing on our growing family.“Capucine, 6 years old, was kept in a house of childminders, with three nannies, far from the intimacy of a home that one would never imagine to be dangerous.