Family murders

I'm not talking about my family, though there are a fair number of skeletons in the cupboard when you start looking for them. I'm talking about the latest case of an apparently estranged father killing his wife/partner and child. While I'm reluctant to generalise it does seem to be a mainly male crime. No one knows exactly what happened or what the family circumstances were but my first thought was - there's got to be a better way of sorting out family problems than this.

People are quick to blame women for using their children as pawns but is this really the whole cause of the problem? I'd be the first to say that women can be nasty, vindictive and deceitful - but so can men. It would be fairer to say 'People can be evil - whatever their sex'. Many blame the family courts for always awarding custody to the mother - is this really true? If the positions were reversed would we see a spate of women killing their partners and children?

If you look at the situation prior to the era of easy divorce when the mother was unlikely to get custody because she was not in a position to support herself and the children financially - were there many cases of mothers killing their children and partners? If there had been then I'm sure someone would have made use of the statistics by now