When Marilyn Sandberg looks at a JibbaJabber doll, she sees an instruction manual for child abuse. David Davenport sees an innocuous rattle toy.
Sandberg is the executive director of the Child Abuse Prevention Council's Ogden chapter. Davenport is senior vice president of marketing for the Ertl Co., Inc., which manufactures the doll.What they don't see eye-to-eye on is whether JibbaJabber teaches children and parents that it's fine to shake an infant or child.
JibbaJabber is a long-necked doll that makes goofy noises - but only when shaken. And since the whole point of having the doll is to shake it, people who counsel against child abuse don't like it.
"In the last four years in the state of Utah, there've been 18 babies who have died as a direct result of being shaken," Sandberg said.
Shaking an infant even mildly, she says, can rupture blood vessels in the brain, causing blindness, brain damage or death.
"For the past three years," she said, "we have been conducting (an educational) program as part of a national effort to stop shaken baby syndrome. . . . Our experience is that most people really have no idea how dangerous it is."
Apparently Davenport was one of those people.
"It wasn't until we launched the product that I even knew about the heinous crime of shaken infant syndrome," Davenport said from Ertl's Dyersville, Iowa, headquarters.
Last February, he said, JibbaJabber was taken to an annual toy fair in New York City where it was viewed by toy buyers, the press and child psychologists.
"No one expressed anything but positive comments about the product" prior to August, when a Milwaukee physician told a local TV station JibbaJabber was "a prototype for violence," Davenport said. "His major concern didn't focus on the toy so much but the packaging."
Sandberg seconded that concern, displaying the instructions printed on the side of the JibbaJabber box: "Try me! Grab my neck and shake my head."
"Is this an age-appropriate toy, to teach little kids who are playing dolls to grab their necks and shake their heads?" Sandberg asked. "We're appalled that a manufacturer could even create such a toy. And we're strongly encouraging parents, `Don't purchase it,' and stores to get rid of it."
Ertl's Davenport said as soon as questions arose about JibbaJabber's packaging, shipments were halted and the packaging was changed.
"We opened up every box and put labels on the product that had already been made to soften the graphic approach," he said.
Ertl made stickers to cover "Try me! Grab my neck and shake my head" wherever it appeared on the existing boxes, and changed the design of future packaging to eliminate the offending phrase.
The company contacted the National Committee to Prevent Child Abuse and together they settled on a warning-information sheet to be placed in future production runs of JibbaJabber dolls, Davenport said.
Sandberg says altering packaging isn't enough. She wants JibbaJabber removed from store shelves and wants Ertl to withdraw the doll.