• Child Abuse
• General Paediatrics

Those of us in the lamentably small group of paediatricians who advise the courts of law on the significance of bruising in infants in whom physical abuse is suspected, will welcome the article by Kemp et al1 as it adds to a relatively small evidence base. It is, for example, only the second article after Nayak and coauthors2 which has examined the significance of petechial bruising in distinguishing abuse from bruising sustained accidentally.

Tucked away in Table 2 of Kemp et al1's paper is a statistic which has gone largely unaccounted for, and which requires explanation. The authors describe bruising in babies who were non-mobile and were able …