Coral and Paul Jones attended the trial of Mark Bridger every day of its four-and-a-half week duration. Of course they did. Where else could they possibly be, when the man accused of abducting and killing their five-year-old daughter was in the dock? For most of us, however, the detail of the trial has been something to be glanced at, too horrible to contemplate in any depth, too horrible to think about.

In the immediate wake of the disappearance of April Jones, on 1 October last year, as she played on her bike in the street outside her home in Machynlleth, mid Wales, it seemed incredible that April's body had not been found, despite the massive resources that had been expended on the search. I don't suppose I was the only person to have been dumbfounded when it was revealed during the trial that evidence had been found in Bridger's home suggesting that the former abattoir worker had destroyed her body in the living room, hall and bathroom of his cottage in the village of Ceinws. Fragments of bone had been found in the wood-burner.

Cottage. Village. Wood-burner. These words suggest idyll – home, hearth, a place where peace comes dropping slow, somewhere to bring up a family. But, no. Not in this story. This story is about all that being annihilated, about domestic normality being torn apart.

The oddest thing is that our culture loves those stories, as long as they are only stories. As Bridger awaited trial, the nation tuned into Broadchurch, making it one of the most successful dramas ITV had ever screened. A small town struggled with the murder of a child, Danny Latimer. It hoped that the killer would be a stranger, and even found a couple of likely suspects sheltering in the community, hiding from their past. But it wasn't them. Danny had been killed by the husband of Detective Sergeant Ellie Miller, the police officer most emotionally engaged with the case. Their son had been a close friend of Danny's and the parents were all lifelong friends as well. The suspicious stranger, in the form of Detective Inspector Alec Hardy, who had been parachuted in to steal Miller's promotion from under her nose, was, on the contrary, the one who solved the case.

It's true Broadchurch did not contain much visceral horror. But The Fall, the show currently attracting viewers on BBC2, does. This time, we know who the killer is from the start. We know his wife. We know his children. We know his in-laws. We float, courtesy of the camera, through the rooms of his home. That intimacy again, that domesticity. And another senior female investigating officer, this time Stella Gibson.

It's not hard to see what inspired this rash of police-procedural dramas featuring female officers investigating crimes in which victim or perpetrator or both are seen in a highly charged domestic setting. The Danish cult hit The Killing made an icon of Detective Inspector Sarah Lund, whose own emotional disengagement from her family only sharpened the contrast as she focused on seeking justice for the shattered family of Nanna Birk Larsen, a 19-year-old who had been raped and murdered. In another Scandinavian crime series, The Bridge, the investigating heroine, Saga Noren, was on the autistic spectrum. In the French series, Spiral, the audience again and again is told that police captain Laure Berthaud has no life at all outside work, no partner, no children, no vegetable patch. Even Dexter, the US series about a mild-mannered serial killer who only murders serial killers, has a sister, Deborah, who is a career-focused, brilliant, lovelorn detective.

All this may seem to be straying very far from the grisly facts of the April Jones case – for a start, no female officer headed a tortuous investigation taking weeks or months. In reality, murder suspects are generally arrested very quickly, if they are arrested at all, as Bridger was. But what the real stories that hit the media and the dramas we devour have in common is that the victims are overwhelmingly women and children. Men are killed, or die, in these shows. But that's usually incidental to the plot, and often because they were up to no good. Victims are always innocent. And in fiction, if not in real life, only women have the tenacity and commitment to bring the killers to justice.

Of course, crime and its solution have long been a staple of entertainment. It fascinates people, men and women. In the realm of genre fiction, particularly, women – Patricia Highsmith, Margery Allingham, Agatha Christie – achieved a measure of dominance early on in its development. People continue to have a voracious appetite for thrillers, and female writers pull no punches when it comes to graphic horror. But these television dramas are a new and distinct development. They're watched by teenagers alongside their parents, in their own homes. And they feature the homes and the family lives of others, others whose domestic safety has been utterly breached.

Most significantly of all, they depict a society in which men are killers, women and children are victims, and strong, clever women are the only ones with passion enough to sacrifice their own intimate lives to bring these men to justice. In Broadchurch, Miller's commitment to the job, it was implied, left her own husband so weirdly vulnerable that he became dependent for love and comfort on another family's child.

It isn't hard, when you watch the news, and see April Jones's face, or Georgia Williams's face, or watch the latest in a line of figures from the entertainment world being charged with sexual assault or rape, to believe that all attackers and killers are men. Even when there's no sexual motive, that impression is only confirmed when you are warned to avert your eyes if you don't want to see disturbing images from Syria, of women and children slumped together in violent death. A man may have been the victim of the Woolwich murder. But men were the perpetrators, too.

Yet just as it is a gross and barbaric travesty of the truth to see the faces of the Woolwich suspects and leap to the illogical conclusion that Muslim equals killer (as the English Defence League so vociferously have done), it is likewise absurd to conclude that man equals killer. Despite a general feeling to the contrary, murder and violence is not a men v women thing, any more than it's a Muslim v Christian thing, and it's surely damaging to see it as such.

I can't help wondering what it's like to be a man, tainted by association with the tiny minority of men who do such things. I can't help wondering, also, if the widespread male defensiveness that such an ever-present prejudice seems understandably to induce is an integral part of the ongoing problem. Women are against violence. We even have a campaigning group called Women Against Violence. Unfortunately, all this also suggests is that men are in favour of violence, and if not violent themselves, then guilty by association. A leading neuroscientist, Kathleen Taylor, this week suggested that in years to come Islamic fundamentalism might be seen as a mental illness. It seems to me that lack of mental health, not gender, is the defining motivation of all violence. The problem isn't men, it's alienation. And believing that men are the problem may be alienating men on a massive scale.