Should we be worried by the number of crime dramas that feature female victims? Probably.

In real life, men are overwhelmingly more likely to be the victims of crime, but on TV and in books it is almost always women who are killed, or kidnapped, or battered, or raped, and in recent years writers have been lingering longer over the details.

It's hard to know why this might be, but it's also hard to avoid the conclusion that, at some level, the audience, including women, are deriving pleasure from it all.

We are horrified when violent crime happens to us but titillated when it happens to other people.

The trend may have started 10 years ago with The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson (the original Swedish title was Men Who Hate Women) but it has accelerated through shows such as The Killing, The Bridge, The Fall, Happy Valley and now Amber (BBC Four, Tuesday, 10pm), a drama from the Irish broadcaster RTE about a young girl who goes missing and may have been murdered.

Amber's central subject itself - missing children and the effect on relatives - is perfectly valid for drama, especially drama that seeks to reflect real life.

In fact, Amber was broadcast the same week the police investigating the disappearance of Madeleine McCann started digging up scrubland in Portugal and just days after officers searched properties in York where Claudia Lawrence disappeared in 2009.

I once spent the morning with Claudia's father Peter as he handed out leaflets to the public as part of the search for his daughter and I remember the tension, frailty, desperation and hope of it.

Amber captured that well in its portrayal of the young girl's parents.

The drama was good in other ways too: the chapter-like structure, for instance, that took us forward in great chunks of time from the initial panic to the first days of the search, right to the moment when the attention of the police and the press moves on and the missing posters start to fade.

The influence of shows that have gone before was also obvious, particularly Nordic noir dramas such as The Killing.

Amber was set in Dublin but it could have been Copenhagen or Stockholm.

There was none of the cliches of an Irish city; instead, the camera lurked along the sharp lines of skyscrapers and huddled under concrete flyovers.

But it was the way the camera followed Amber herself that was most disturbing, the way it held back in the trees as she walked off to her fate.

It turned us into voyeurs, which is what happens in modern crime series, with their focus on the crime and its effects, in a way it didn't in classic crime series, with their focus on detection.

This may not be a sign of anything more sinister than an interest in crime, which humans have always possessed, but we should be careful the continuing focus on women as victims doesn't distort our view of crime or more importantly distort our view of women.