Sally Faulkner with her two children Lahala, 6, and Noah, 4, in Beirut after the child recovery operation. Its glamour and drama were manifest - pretty mother, an anguished separation, a high-stakes retrieval, the heart-warming reunion. The ratings would have been a record. Instead, the abduction attempt was botched. Faulkner retrieved her children for only a brief period before they were returned to their father and she was arrested, along with the attendant TV crew and the professional child snatchers either she or 60 Minutes paid for (it is unclear which). But no matter how stupid the attempted abduction, and how traumatic the episode must have been for Faulkner's children, I venture most mothers reading the reports had the same thought: I understand why she did it.

The 60 Minutes team in custody in Lebanon: Tara Brown, David "Tangles" Ballment, Stephen Rice and Ben Williamson. Meanwhile, in Australia, a tale of another mother allegedly driven to desperation played out in the disadvantaged outer-Melbourne suburb of Heidelberg West. Sofina Nikat, 22, of South Asian descent, who had recently migrated from Fiji, was charged with killing her 14-month-old girl, Sanaya Sahib. Sanaya Sahib's body was found in Darebin Creek last year. Nikat was separated from her child's father, reportedly because the relationship became abusive. It's been alleged that the people with whom she sought refuge were dangerous too; two men who had contact with the child recently have been charged with serious offences. One is believed to be a violent ice addict.

Nikat had obviously struggled to cope. She contacted Victoria's Department of Health and Human Services seeking assistance. While there is always a public howl when authorities fail to prevent a child's death, there is next to no political appetite to provide money to ameliorate the misery that leads to such deaths. Now in custody, she is reported to be severely mentally unwell and at risk of self-harming. But, in spite of her probable mental health problems and her disadvantage, the allocation of sympathy in Nikat's case is much more complex. The natural maternal reaction to the allegations against Nikat is the polar opposite to the Faulkner case: I cannot understand how any mother could do that. No matter how bad it got. Because above all else, we value the lives of our children, right?

Whenever there is a child death against a background of dysfunction, the same questions are always asked. How could this have been allowed to happen? Why didn't family services intervene earlier? "Did authorities do enough to protect Sanaya?" one headline read. No one ever asks where the children should be taken to, or who will pay for this mysterious safe place. Which brings us to the differing political reactions to the two mothers' plights.

In the Faulkner case we have Foreign Affairs Minister Julie Bishop personally intervening to set up a joint Lebanese-Australian taskforce to resolve the family dispute. We have Australian diplomats working around the clock to get the Australian mother and the 60 Minutes crew out of jail. Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull has commented on the case. But down among the broken playgrounds and the generational misery of Heidelberg West, there is no political response. No high-level government machinery has whirred into action. While there is always a public howl when authorities fail to prevent a child's death, there is next to no political appetite to provide money to ameliorate the misery that leads to such deaths. Few politicians ever go to an election promising more money for the family services department to take kids out of bad homes. Few politicians ever allocate extra funds to build better group homes, or promise to do anything to relieve the creaking load placed on the caseworkers who work with dysfunctional families referred to the state.

With the exception of terrorism, there are few political dividends in preventing an ill from occurring. Much better to invent one and promise you will fix it. In NSW the "disgrace" of "soft sentencing" has worked for successive governments. The fact that crime is falling in almost every category has not dimmed the political enthusiasm for law and order campaigns. Meanwhile, programs that teach basic mothering skills to disadvantaged women whose children are at risk of being removed from their care are desperate for money. Some are funded by the NSW government, but only at the extreme end, and they are massively over-subscribed.

The gap is filled by the charity sector, which reports great difficulty in raising money for women who are at risk of harming or neglecting their babies. One tireless woman I spoke to this week runs her small disadvantaged mothers' groups through a patchwork of private grants. She spends her weekends working on the applications. And as soon as children lose their chubby Facebook photogenicity? Their political value could barely be lower. Particularly if they're Indigenous. Aboriginal children are 24 times more likely to be locked up than non-Aboriginal kids. They are 6 per cent of the general youth population and more than 90 per cent of the jailed youth population. This is despite the fact that we know there is an unarguable correlation between the involvement of children with child protection services and the likelihood of them ending up in the juvenile justice system.

They are called "crossover kids". Judge Mark Marien, the former president of the NSW Children's Court, said that in the case of many young offenders "the clear underlying cause of their offending behaviour is essentially a welfare issue rather a criminogenic one". In other jurisdictions as diverse as Sweden and New Zealand, child offenders are diverted away from the justice system as much as possible, and reoffending rates are lower than in Australia where a more punitive approach is taken. But again, when is the last time you heard a politician going to an election with a "Less punitive on crime!" slogan, even if it was only applied to children? We hold it as a dear collective truth that, as a society, we put our children first.

But in reality, unless there is a 60 Minutes crew attached, they don't always rate. A note for those leaving comments: Charges have been laid in these cases, but guilt has not been established in regards to the allegations. Comments on this article will be moderated to reflect this.