A Mother's Nightmare Becomes a Campaign

It's an image forever seared into Catherine Sanders's mind: her infant son Ryan, bruised and hooked up to life support, struggling to survive.

This month, people in the Washington region, as well as in New York, Chicago and Los Angeles, will see that image, too, an experience the Manassas mother hopes will raise awareness about shaken baby syndrome.

Her goal is for the photos of her son, which will be displayed in ads on buses during National Child Abuse Prevention Month, "to be disturbing, so people realize that it's real and this is what they look like when they're shaken," Sanders said. "It's not done in play. It's done with the intent of shutting up the baby. . . . They don't care. They're just going, 'I'll do anything to make that baby stop crying.' "

According to the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, a division of the National Institutes of Health, shaken baby syndrome is "a type of inflicted traumatic brain injury that happens when a baby is violently shaken. A baby has weak neck muscles and a large, heavy head. Shaking makes the fragile brain bounce back and forth inside the skull and causes bruising, swelling, and bleeding, which can lead to permanent, severe brain damage or death." According to the National Center on Shaken Baby Syndrome, an estimated 1,200 to 1,400 children nationwide are injured or killed by shaking every year.

Ryan, 16, was shaken by a child-care worker when he was 8 weeks old, Sanders said. He cannot talk, has trouble walking and using the toilet and gets frustrated easily because he has such difficulty communicating his thoughts and needs.

Sanders is director of Shaken Baby Prevention. The nonprofit group pays for children with special needs to participate in various activities, such as camping and horseback riding. It has also provided wheelchairs, special needs bicycles and hand rails, she said.

Sanders began running shaken baby syndrome awareness ads in 1999, first on billboards. The campaign has expanded to include buses and restaurant tabletops.

"I try to think of something different and big every year," Sanders said.

The bus ads promote Sanders's Web site, http://www.sbsprevention.com, and are sponsored by Manassas Park-based Shred-A-File Systems. They will appear on 10 OmniLink buses in Virginia, 20 Metrobuses in the District and 40 buses each in New York, Los Angeles and Chicago, she said. She aims to take the ads to the United Kingdom in the fall.

As Sanders's ad campaign has developed over the years, so have Ryan's needs. These days, Sanders is most concerned with preparing him for adult life. He has undergone several growth spurts, weighs about 150 pounds and has become strong, which can make him more difficult to handle when he gets upset. Ryan is learning sign language, but the process is slow-going, sometimes taking a year to learn a single sign, she said.

"Everything with him takes a really long time," Sanders said. "We have to be extra patient."