DISTRAUGHT with grief, Dionne Dalton collapsed in the driveway of her estranged husband's home after learning he had killed their two young children and taken his own life at the end of a bitter custody battle.

Police from Australia's northern state of Queensland had discovered 13-week-old Patrick and his one-year-old sister Jessie lying side by side on a bed in the suburban family home.

They had been suffocated by their father Jayson, 32, who then killed himself - two days after the family-law campaigner learned he would not be the primary carer of his children.

Their mother's heartbreak, splashed across newspapers and television last month, highlighted the increasing number of families devastated by parents separating, with Australia's divorce rate at an all-time high.

The Dalton tragedy was the latest in a series of highly publicized cases in which a devoted father killed his own children, an act that is termed "filicide".

Australian Institute of Criminology data shows an average of 25 children a year are killed by their parents between 1989 and 2002 with a total of 86 murdered after their parents split. Fathers were twice as likely to kill as mothers.

"Men are not very good with the short-term, acute stress of separation," said Bryan Rodgers, Australian National University senior fellow in the centre for mental health.

"You don't just want to be thinking of suicide prevention in terms of how do you spot the small number of people a year that are going to do this. You need to think in terms of the thousands of people a year that are getting divorced."

In Britain, a government study found nearly 80 children a year were killed by their parents, while in the US the FBI reported there were 449 cases in 2002 in which a parent killed a son or daughter, but the number includes adult children.

Desperated fathers

Late last year estranged Sydney father Steven Fraser was convicted of murdering his three children - Ashley, 7, Ryan, 5, and Jarrod, 4, - during a weekend visit.

Fraser, who said he had wanted to "protect" his children, drugged and drowned his sons before writing "I love you, RIP" on their foreheads. He killed his daughter the next day.

Research in Australia has shown the suicide rate for separated men is 18 times higher than for separated women.

Australia's divorce rate soared in 2001 to its highest level in the past 20 years with 55,300 couples granted a divorce - affecting 53,400 children under 18. This compared with 103,100 weddings, according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics.

The tragedy of fathers killing their children hit the national spotlight in May 2000 when a federal member of parliament, Greg Wilton, was arrested by police in a car with a hose attached to its exhaust in a national park.

His children, aged three and five, were with him but unhurt.

Wilton, who had recently separated from his wife, was admitted for psychiatric treatment but committed suicide about two weeks later after his release from medical care.

Jenny Mouzos, manager of the Australian Institute of Criminology's national homicide monitoring programme, said no crime provoked as much outrage as killing children.

"This is especially true when those who are supposed to protect and nurture, turn on their own offspring and take their life away in the most unnatural way possible," she said.

Wilton's suicide and increasing complaints from fathers that the Family Court system was stacked against them prompted the conservative government to initiate an inquiry into how to better handle the emotive issue of child custody and reform family law.

Law reforms

In December, the inquiry panel recommended setting up a family tribunal as the contact point for separating parents.

This would give them a chance to sort out differences before going to the Family Court, whose rulings it is hard to overturn.

The inquiry also proposed the government adopt a clear presumption, that can be rebutted, in favour of equal shared parental responsibility - or joint legal custody - as a starting point for couples when they separate.

At present, both parents initially have to take responsibility, but the panel said this does not happen.

Bureau of Statistics data show only 2.6 per cent of children in separated families live in shared care arrangements, where each natural parent spends at least 30 per cent of the time looking after their children.

(Agencies via Xinhua)