Behavioral Characteristics and Medicolegal Identification of Infanticide

Abstract

Due to the concealment and incidence higher than reported statistics, infanticide should attract the attention of legal medical experts. The infanticide process has common behavioral characteristics. The perpetrators are most frequently biological mothers who are unmarried, with inferior education, and lack of routine pregnancy tests. Medicolegal identification of infanticide cases includes identification of live births and causes of death. Besides the classical lung floating test, there are other methods to identify live births such as pulmonary interstitial emphysema, CT imaging examination, immunohistochemical examination of umbilical cord vitality markers. Neonatal line measurement is the only way to identify live births in corpse with severe decomposition. The main causes of death in infanticide are mechanic asphyxia and fatal head trauma. Shaken baby syndrome, as a common abusive head trauma, is pathologically characterized by the triad of encephalopathy, subdural haemorrhage （SDH） and retinal haemorrhage （RH）. During the autopsy of suspected shaking baby syndrome, in addition to carefully examining cervical cord, the possibility of pathological temporal lobe hemorrhage should also be ruled out.

Keywords

• forensic pathology; infanticide; shaken baby syndrome; review