Parents are meant to love and protect their children, not kill them.

Who would kill their own child?

Less than a week after we saw the heart-wrenching image of three-year old Aylan Kurdi’s lifeless body on that Turkish beach, we learned that a 52-year-old Brisbane father had been charged with murdering his six-year-old daughter.

Today, we woke to the horrific news that a seven-year old boy had been stabbed to death in his neighbour’s front yard in Sydney, allegedly at the hands of his uncle.

In a single doomed trip across the Mediterranean, Abdullah Kurdi lost his wife and both his sons. The world is reeling from his unimaginable grief and the conflict that created it. Kurdi’s plea to ‘let this be the last’ has spurred an overdue global response to the atrocities enveloping Syria and its surrounds.

Closer to home, two families are reeling from completely different, but also horrific, tragedies. Children being murdered allegedly at the hands of the very people meant to care for them – their family.

In Brisbane’s north, six-year old Sidney was found dead in her bed by her mother on Monday morning. Her father was arrested and charged with her murder later that evening.

The Courier Mail now reports that he may have intended to kill not just Sidney, but her older sister as well. His wife was alerted to noises in the night and took the older girl into her bed unwittingly saving her from her own father.

Thirty-six hours later, a seven-year-old boy was found stabbed to death in the front yard of a neighbour’s home in Sydney. His grandmother’s body was buckled to her knees on a lawn not far away.

His uncle has been taken into custody, but not yet charged.

These actions are impossible to fathom, let alone come to terms with. Who would want to kill a little boy? Who could murder their own six-year old daughter?

They’re impossible questions to answer.

Parents give children life, they don’t take it away. Parents and family are meant to protect, nurture, care and teach their children. Not harm them and certainly not kill them.

Didn’t they feel overwhelmed by a primeval, fierce dedication to keep their child, or children, safe? Did parents who go on to murder their children ever make a silent vow into the downy, soft scalp of their tiny newborn like so many of us do?

Surely as their tiny baby grew into a toddler and then a child, at some point, they felt that surge of love, that determination to protect? How could they not?

As hard as it is to believe, a roll call of names shows us that something, somewhere goes wrong in a parent’s love.

Names like Luke Batty, Jai, Bailey and Tyler Farquharson, Savannah and Indianna Mihayo, River and Nyobi Hinder.

And now names like six-year old Sidney – a budding jiu-jitsu star who last year earned a trophy for being the “spirit of her club” and “for her happy approach to life.”

These are just a few of the victims we have come to know over the past decade who have been killed at the hands of a parent.

Related: What really drives a man to murder his own children?

It can be either parent – mother or father – who kills their child but far more fathers kill their own children than mothers do. Six out of every ten children in filicide (the deliberate act of a parent killing their child) are killed by their fathers.

In the US 450 children are killed every year by their parents. In Australia, the number is smaller – around 27 a year, but between 2002 and 2012 this adds up to 238 children killed by their parent or parents.

Yet we do not understand why. Studies have shown that murders by mothers are “altruistic” — they murder out of love, not out of hate, with a genuine belief that they are doing the children “a favour”.

Related: Melbourne mother charged over the death of three children.

Fathers get painted with a darker brush. They murder out of revenge a lot of the time.

Jack Levin, an American criminologist, told USA Today that mothers who murder tend to kill their newborns on impulse. “The day a child is born is the day a child is most likely to be killed by a parent,” he says.

But for fathers it is different – planned, often meticulous. They are more likely to kill the entire family, then themselves.

“A man sees himself as the main support of a family,” forensic psychiatrist Phillip Resnick told USA Today, “He may feel like it is his responsibility to not let his family suffer. You may have a severely depressed father who may think his children are better off dead with him.”

And yet despite expert after expert attempting to explain it to us over and over, we are appalled and confused by these cases.

When sentencing Arthur Freeman, the father who threw his four-year-old daughter Darcey off Melbourne’s Westgate Bridge in 2009, Justice Paul Coghlan put words to our disbelief:

“You brought the broader community into this case in a way that has been rarely, if ever, seen before. It offends our collective conscience,” he said.

It doesn’t just offend, it also sickens and breaks us.

The awful awful truth is, it will happen again. It is another dark reality of the inexplicable toll family violence takes.

If this post brings up any issues for you in relation to family violence, or if you just feel like you need to speak to someone, please call 1800 RESPECT (1800 737 732) – the national sexual assault, domestic and family violence counselling service. It doesn’t matter where you live, they will take your call and, if need be, refer you to a service closer to home.

If this post brings up issues for you in relation to suicide, or you just need someone to talk to, please call Lifeline on 131 114. You can also visit the Lifeline website here and the Beyond Blue website here.