The Americans have a word for it. Or, rather, two. They call men who kill their children (and often themselves) �family annihilators�.

The Americans have a word for it. Or, rather, two. They call men who kill their children (and often themselves) "family annihilators". They are not as rare a breed as we prefer to think; in the past couple of years we have seen several families wiped out by deliberate drowning, fire-raising, smothering and asphyxiation.

The most awful statistic is that more than half of murdered children are killed by one or other of their parents. Where the culprit is the father, what adds another layer of chill to these heart-stopping crimes is that a high percentage are alleged to be prompted by an act of revenge for family breakdown or sexual infidelity. Killing what is most precious to the mother is deemed the ultimate act of vengeance by the father. A jealous nature and a pre-history of domestic violence, often hidden, also show up as common factors in the small number of studies done both here and in the United States. Uniformly tragic as these episodes are, we tend to view the crimes differently when mothers are perpetrators.

Most are deemed to have been in the throes of a particularly desperate form of post-natal depression, or a similarly debilitating mental disorder. We have little difficulty assuming that a person who deliberately kills children she has carried must be clinically mad; demented by unimaginable demons. How else could she commit such a heinous crime when the norm would be to protect them by sacrificing her own life, if that's what their survival would take? We do not, as a rule, extend that charity to men.

If they kill their children but fail to commit suicide, it's common to mock their subsequent pleas of insanity. The former wife of the man who threw his son to his death from a hotel room in Crete then jumped himself clutching his daughter insisted throughout his trial that he was bad rather than mad. The court begged to differ and locked him up in a psychiatric unit. Hardly surprising, given a family history which included the suicide of two brothers. And when you examine these truly grotesque cases, it's surely difficult to conclude that the men involved were, in the normal sense of the word, sane at the time of their actions.

What rational being would suppose that killing his children to spite his wife would make his life whole again? Neither is suicide a balanced act outside of the special circumstances of wishing not to prolong a life made unbearable by pain or disease. This is not to underestimate the depth of grief the bereaved mother has to confront.

Being pre-deceased by children is an offence against the natural order of things; losing your family to a brutal act committed by the man with whom you created it must border on the unbearable.

Yet it would be colossally unjust to draw wholesale conclusions from these awful crimes about the nature of maleness or the quality of contemporary fatherhood. Just two weeks before this latest tragedy, another young father unhesitatingly threw himself into a river in spate to save his little daughter from drowning, without any regard to his own safety. Surely a more typical modern dad, in an age when you watch so many men taking an obvious delight in hands-on parenting. I hold no particular brief for organisations such as Fathers 4 Justice, whose recent high-profile stunts tend, in my view, to detract from the seriousness of the message they want to convey. Nor for their more extreme counterparts who use their personal circumstances as an alibi for ill-disguised misogyny.

Nevertheless, it is a fact that over the piece more men than women have been disenfranchised as parents by access arrangements that go pear-shaped, usually on the back of acrimonious separations. Yes, there are thousands of men out there who default on their responsibilities to contribute to the upkeep of the children they fathered.

But, equally, there are millions who love and cherish their sons and daughters and who would be bereft at losing the chance to nurture them. So when confronted by events such as the young mechanic killing his two tiny daughters, it seems to me important to look at that specific tragedy only in the context of that particular relationship.

There will be countless fathers, as well as mothers, who heard of the death of those little girls and felt an involuntary shiver in their hearts; who hugged their own daughters that much more closely as they went to bed. Yet we live in a society so terrified by the evidence of paedophilia that many men are positively frightened to display a natural affection around children other than their own. We mustn't let another ghastly family tragedy further feed our paranoia.