Mean spirited ideology or a presumption that every child wants the love of both parents in equal measure

However, they don't. When the divorcing mother Gabriela Garcia jumped off the same Melbourne bridge just seven months earlier, with her 22 month old baby son Oliver there were no tortured calls for a public inquiry. The silence regarding the death of this infant boy by the supposed champions of children's interests was and still is deafening.

The heartwrenching murders of Darcey Freeman and Oliver Garcia are the product of despair or incomprehensible madness and should not be a catalyst for gender wars. To borrow the common-sense words of social commentator Bettina Arndt " Neither sex has a monopoly on vice or virtue."

And to set the record straight. Do I have any sympathy for the Arthur Freeman's or Gabriela Garcia's of this world? Not one bit. Nothing can ever excuse the murder of the innocent.

The Howard government's 2006 shared parenting legislation specifically refers to "the need to protect the child from the risk of physical or psychological harm caused by family violence or child abuse" [s60CC 2(b)]. The legislation also clearly establishes that where shared care has been ordered by a court, the presumption of shared parental responsibility is dependent on there being no family violence or child abuse [s61DA 2(a)]. Putting a child into a possibly violent situation contradicts the law. So what are the one sided exaggerations peddled by shared parenting detractors all about?

Despite the posturing I suggest the motivation is not a primary concern on the safety of children but is grounded in a mean-spirited anti father ideology that assumes the worst behaviour of the most extreme individual is the norm. Family law should not be based on this presumption of pathology.

Every child centred healthy individual knows that children want and have a right to the love of both their parents in equal measure. It is past time to entrench this principle in law.

The article "When Dads Get Deadly" (Christine Jackman, Australian, 17 September 2003) provides chilling statistics on filicide that challenge conventional wisdom.

Referring to a recent Sydney murder/suicide tragedy Christine Jackman writes:

[D]espite the disproportionate amount of publicity these crimes attract when they occur; murder-suicides committed by a father are among the rarest forms of child homicide. Australian Institute of Criminology statistics show there were 270 child homicide incidents in Australia from July 1989 to June 1999, involving 287 identified offenders and resulting in the deaths of 316 children under 15…

When children (younger than 15) are killed in Australia, they are most likely to be killed by a family member (66.9 per cent), primarily a parent (94.2 per cent)," AIC research analyst Jenny Mouzos says in her report 'Homicidal Encounters.' Although fathers are responsible for most cases of filicide these numbers are inflated by the number of non-biological fathers who kill children.

When Mouzos crunched figures on the distribution of parents who killed children by gender and biological ties, she found biological mothers posed a more lethal risk to their own. Biological mothers account for about 35 per cent of all filicides (about the same proportion as stepfathers and de factos), while biological fathers account for 29 per cent.

What is more according to Men's Health Australia the Australian Institute of Criminology (AIC) had cause to correct an error in its National Homicide Monitoring Program 2006-07 Annual Report. "The original report stated that 7 homicides involved a mother and 15 involved male family members. "

The rectified report now states that:

11 homicides involved a mother and 11 homicides involved a male family member. When the 'male family member' category was broken down, 5 perpetrators were biological fathers, while another 5 five were de-facto partners of the mother who lived with the child (one father murdered two children). No child victims were killed by a complete stranger in 2006-07.

Of the 14 offenders who who committed suicide following the 2006-07 homicide incident four (29%) had child victims. In all four cases the offender was the custodial parent (two mothers; two fathers).

The usage of male family member and mother is not a useful way of classifying relationship between a child homicide victim and their offender. In future reports we will employ classifications that provide a more detailed classification of the relationship between child victims and offenders" the AIC acknowledged.

Further, according to a study published in 2009 by the Medical Journal of Australia that examined instances of family homicide/revenge/homicide-suicide in NSW between 1991-2005 men were the perpetrators of child homicide in ten cases while women were the perpetrators in seven instances. Notably, the study did not indicate the offenders biological relationships to the child victims.