Andrea Dunlop

So I think in the cases where someone has suffocated their child, poisoned their child, really put their child's life at risk,

I just don't think that's someone who should be alone with children anymore.

But they may be able to be treated and have some kind of reckoning for their behavior with their children, have some kind of well-monitored relationship with their children.

Again, that's very rare cases.

But this isn't something where you send someone to therapy and parenting classes and you leave the children in the house and they're going to be safe.

They're absolutely not.

Because it's a crime.

If they keep doing the crime, that's recidivism.

As far as I know, I don't think you could ever say 100 percent.

But I mean, certainly, like, I've never seen a case where the behavior is halted.

Yeah.

We don't have great data on this.

There are people when they, media outlets frequently describe this as much more rare than it actually is.

And they give this sort of old statistic that was from a British study that is from a long time ago and didn't use gray methodology.

So that's a thing that happens a lot with science writing, unfortunately.

There are some more recent studies.

There's one from Seattle Children's.

They put it at about a third the rate of abusive head trauma cases, which is the most common form of child abuse of young children.

We think it's a lot more common than what is currently recognized.

There are many barriers to getting good data on it.