The European Conference on Shaken Baby Syndrome was supported by a range of organisations including the police, the NSPCC, and the Royal Society of Medicine, and sponsored by the American agency the National Centre on Shaken Baby Syndrome.
Labour member of the European Parliament Catherine Stihler told the conference that while some babies were deliberately shaken to death, others died by accident and that some babies died due to the actions of 'tired or frustrated parents and carers who don't know any better'.
She called for a public awareness campaign to stress how vulnerable young babies were to shaking, and said that incidences of SBS are 'too often not recognised in hospitals and the death is not logged as being caused by shaking'.
There are no accurate figures for the number of shaken baby cases in the UK. However, chief inspector Phil Wheeler, the police expert on SBS, said the true level could be far higher than the 200 cases that reached the courts each year.
Also at the conference was Rioch Edwards-Brown of the Five Percenters, a group she founded in 1998 after being wrongly accused of shaking her son.
The group insists that one in 20 SBS cases could have been misdiagnosed and that minor falls and birth trauma may be responsible instead. She addressed some of the 48 rolling workshops to stress that 'there are injuries that are innocent of shaking but mimic shaking'.
Ms Edwards-Brown was herself cleared after tests showed that trauma at birth and not shaking was responsible for her son's death. She said that in the past seven years she had taken more than 2,000 calls from parents and looked at three or four new cases each month where parents may have been wrongly accused of shaking their babies.
The NSPCC followed the conference with a symposium on protecting babies, with a call for organisations and professionals to recognise the importance of supporting parents, and for greater public education on the dangers of shaking and hitting babies. Chris Cloke, the NSPCC's head of child protection, said, 'Many parents and carers, particularly those who are inexperienced and unsupported, can find the responsibility of caring for a baby overwhelming.'