WE ALL seem to make the implicit assumption that children are best cared for by women and preferably their mothers. We never question why and never ask whether the assumption is still valid today.

Women are seen as better equipped than men to care for young children, and that under their supervision they will come to less harm. Men are seen as lacking the ability to comprehend or adjust to children's needs and, almost biologically, to lack the necessary patience, commitment and understanding.

Our unquestioning conviction pre-determines much of what we do and how we decide matters. This singular blind faith puts the custody of children in divorce permanently out of reach of fathers. It immutably precludes fatherly involvement in child development in the years following divorce.

But do the facts bear out our trust, or is it all illusory? Are we prepared to face a prospect where cosy reassuring myths explode into fictions?

The truth is: mothers kill more babies and young children than fathers do, and women abuse more children than men do.

In fact, the highest probability of being murdered is not as an adolescent in a pub brawl or in your 20s being mugged or attacked in your own home; it's in the first months and years of life.

The likelihood of infant death is 27 per million compared with the national average of 14 per million.

Closer examination of the facts reveals that baby boys under 12 months old are more likely to be murdered than girls: 55 and 42 per million respectively.

'In 1992 only 385 deaths of under one-year-olds were reported as homicides' (Criminal Statistics England and Wales 1996. Home Office.) This would seem to suggest that further deaths were ascribed to other causes. It is interesting to note that the indictments for infanticide (an exclusively female defence for child murder: i.e. yet another attempt to cover up violence by women) totalled no more than 4 in that year. (Source as above.)

Figures for other years from the same source show that in 1995 when there were 754 deaths in England and Wales, initially recorded as homicides, show a clear 66:33 split between male and female victims and one is left to wonder where the infant homicides have gone.

In October 1997 surveillance cameras in a baby ward videod 34 women out of 39 attempting to smother or seriously harm their babies. (BBC TV news. North Staffordshire Hospital.) Approximately 60% of all women murderers premeditate their act. (Justice Quarterly March 1988)

The figures for child abuse are similarly disturbing. It is estimated that some 35,000 suffer abuse every year with many thousands being taken into care every year.

Of the children on the NSPCC Protection Register, 60% lived either with their mother alone or with their mother and her boyfriend, or father substitute.

Not only does 60% of abuse and neglect stem from mothers but the figure seems almost the 'standard' in many developed countries, e.g. UK, US, Canada and Australia.

At last, some of the few remaining taboos have been broken; researchers are now asking about child sexual abuse by women, now estimated at 35% or more of all reported child sexual abuse. (BBC Panorama Child Sexual Abuse by Women.) This compares with the more openly admitted and traditional non-sexual abuse/neglect of children by women where the incidence rate is about 60%.

A seminal British study, the Family Court Reporter Survey 1982 - 88 for England and Wales, confirms that a child is safest when his biological parents are married and least safe when his mother is cohabiting with a man other than her husband. The same report presents concrete evidence that children are between 20 to 33 times safer living with their married, biological parents than in any other family configuration.

The rate of abuse is 33 times higher if a child is living with a mother who is cohabiting with another man.

Similar risks apply in cases of fatal child abuse where the overwhelming number of child deaths occurred in households in which the child's biological mother was cohabiting with someone who was unrelated to the child. This clearly demonstrates how dangerous divorce can be for children.

The above report deals only in well established facts and clearly gives the lie to those supporters of lone parenthood. When Claire Rayner and others say that 'To assume that having two parents together is necessarily better is one of the fantasies' they are clearly indulging in woolly thinking which flies in the face of these facts.

It is this woolly thinking, and the reluctance in the UK to face hard and unpleasant facts, which do not fit society's preconceived ideas, that prevents research into such subjects as female abuse of children, and, when such research is undertaken, to prevent its publication.

However, for those readers who wish to check out the facts for themselves I print below two lists of research papers etc from Canada and the USA which have better track records in such research. Given the fact that in all research into family matters, the similarity in all Western countries is amazingly close, I think we can ignore the fact that the evidence is not UK based.

CANADA:

Child abusers are more likely to be women - Richard Gelles 1979 quoted in the Health and Welfare Canada Report 1989, Family Violence: a Review of Theoretical and Clinical Literature.

Seven out of ten cases of examined women were the abusers of children - Bonnie & Scalre 1969.

Mothers are perpetrators of abuse upon children at least equally with fathers. - Senator Anne Cools (Canada) 1995.

In 1986 a child abuse morbidiity analysis of 100 children (covering the years 1973 - 1982) who suffered abuse and/or neglect and who subsequently died, found that mothers were the largest perpetrators. Mothers accounted for 38 deaths, fathers accounted for 12 and 13 were ascribed to both parents. - Dr Cyril Greenland, University of Toronto.

Physical abuse of children is the only form of family violence in which women are the perpetrators as often as men - Brienes & Gordon, The Health and Welfare Canada report 1989, Family Violence: a Review of Theoretical and Clinical Literature.

In 50 out of 57 cases, women were found to be the child abuser. -Steel & Pollock 1969.

Evidence was found that mothers are more likely than fathers to be abusive. - Bell 1986

Mothers were identified in 38.7% of cases as the abuser and fathers 18.4% rising to 31% where cohabitation i.e. boyfriends or stepfathers were involved. - Benedict et al 1985.

Mothers and mother substitutes are suspected abusers in 44% of cases and fathers and father substitutes in 46.5% of cases. -Creighton 1979.

In 1993 there were 46,683 child maltreatment investigations undertaken by all 54 children's aid societies. The study defined child maltreatment as any one of: physical abuse, sexual abuse, neglect or emotional maltreatment. The findings are as follows:

Total number of cases substantiated of child maltreatment showed that mothers were responsible for 49% of all cases

and fathers 31% of all cases.

In the category of child neglect, mother perpetrated 85% of cases.

In the category of physical abuse mothers perpetrated 39% of cases and biological fathers 40%.

In the category of emotional maltreatment, mothers were found responsible for 79% of all substantiated cases.

Mothers were also highlighted as being heavily involved in physical abuse, especially in the newly born (zero months) to the three-year-old category.

Significantly, 59% of all cases regarded abuse to boy babies by their mothers. This bias continued through into the age group 4 to 11 where recordings showed 55% of cases involved boy children.

The largest single family group/style at 35% was the single mother unit. - Dr Cyril Greenland. University of Toronto.

USA: (Compiled 1996)

Over one third (36%) of children in America today do not live with their biological father. US Marriage / 6.

Children from disrupted marriages were 70% more likely than those living with both biological parents to have been expelled or suspended. - Dawson.

Children of divorce are twice as likely as children from intact families to drop out of school. - Zill 1993.

Of juveniles and young adults serving in long term correctional facilities, 70% did not live with both parents growing up. - US Marriage / 6 (Age of majority in USA is 21)

Appximately 60% of all murderesses premeditate their murder. - Coramae Rochey Mann, Getting Even? Women Who Kill in Domestic Encounters. Justice Quarterly. March