By William Collins aka MRA-UK: Data on child homicides, and the perpetrators thereof, is subject to considerable obfuscation. The incompleteness and inconsistencies in child homicide data have been well described by Robert Whiston and Nigel Hawkes, and the overall picture is summarised in http://mhrm.uk/wiki/killing-children/. In a forthcoming post I will return to this issue with particular emphasis on perpetrators.
Cot death (SIDS) has been related to laying babies prone (right) rather than supine (left) The present post is by way of being a precursor to this. Here I look first at the data on all child deaths. The overwhelming bulk of these are from natural causes. Nevertheless the data reveals some interesting features, not least the dependence of child death rates on marital status, cohabitation and lone parenthood.
The focus of this post, though, is on unexplained infant deaths. We shall see that the dependence of unexplained infant death rates on marital status, cohabitation and lone parenthood is particularly marked. There are features in the data which are disconcerting and, I suspect, politically incorrect to notice. Hence the post.
It has long been argued that a certain, but unknown, percentage of unexplained infant deaths are actually covert homicides. This, then, forms the link with the planned subsequent post.



