A way to make me almost cry in the middle of lecture:

I saw the saddest video clips today in my psychology class. The video was on Munchusaun(sp?) by Proxy. For those of you who do not know what this is, it basically is when parents will inflict pain/harm/illness on their children so they can gain attention/pity/praise for themselves through their actions of "being a good parent" by bring them to the hospital and trying to cure their children. This is an oversimplified definition, but you should get the idea. Anyway, the video we saw, was of parents in the act of harming their children (in hospital surveillance videos). One video showed a father smothering this one year old daughter. He was putting his hand over her mouth and pressing down hard. You could see the little girl struggling by throwing her arms and legs around. This went of for about a minute, until finally he stopped. The girl's gasping for air was so loud, it was drowning out the noise from TV (I should also note that the girl did not get any real permanent damage). The father then went to the nurse and told her that his daughter had stopped breathing. When questioned, he said he had tried to help her by shaking her. Once the man was told that he was caught on camera, he just said he wanted an attorney. Seriously, watching those clips was not cool, I had to close my eyes through most of it.