Thousands of British servicemen on duty overseas are fathers of young children, their experience of fatherhood interrupted by months of enforced absence. Wives and girlfriends caring for their children, like generations of such women before them, have had to adapt to this on-off family life, lived out against a background of anxiety for their husbands’ safety.

When Adam Turney joined the Royal Navy, he probably assumed that one day he would be just such an absent father. It is much less likely that he contemplated the possibility of being at home with a young child as his wife served overseas, least of all awaiting the outcome of her very public capture. Instead of seeing action, he is cast in a supporting role, undergoing the terrible ordeal of knowing his wife is in danger but being powerless to protect her.

In the meantime he devotes his attention to the couple’s three-year-old daughter. As women serve alongside men in increasing numbers in our armed forces, it is inevitable that more and more fathers will be left at home raising children while their wives and girlfriends are exposed to danger abroad.

Are we really comfortable with the prospect of mothers going on active service, separated from their children and risking their lives for us? It is clear that the Iranian authorities expected the British public to be more concerned about the fate of Faye Turney than that of her male crew members. Had they instead singled out one of the men, even though he might be a father, the public impact would have been less. Yet, as Turney made clear in an interview preceding her capture, women in the forces — even those with young children — expect to be treated the same as male colleagues.

Western equal opportunities legislation requires us to make no distinction between the ability of men and women to undertake a task, however hazardous. Legislation also requires that women should not be treated differently on the grounds of motherhood. The phenomenon of mothers at war is nothing more than the logical conclusion of sex equality. So any concern that we might feel when a mother is placed in danger should, in theory, be dismissed as outdated. But theory may not be much use in a crisis.

Colonel Bob Stewart, a British commander in Bosnia, said last week that the presence of women in risky situations was a distraction, because many servicemen were still inclined to protect women and would be more distressed by the death of a woman. Such distress can only be heightened where the woman is a mother. The sailors taken captive with Turney might have considered themselves immune from such old-fashioned sentiment. But as Turney was paraded last week, their concern for her will almost certainly have been different from their attitude to the male crew member later singled out.

Is it wrong to accept that such a difference exists? Maybe we should be demonstrating our ability to rise above Iranian tactics by asserting that Leading Seaman Turney’s fate is of no more significance than that of male crew. Why should a mother be more important to her children than a father?

We know both have an important role to play. The government has reminded us often enough that mothers and fathers are interchangeable and it wants to see more men involved with childcare so that women can spend more time at work. Yet when the family courts are deciding which parent should have primary custody of children after divorce, the presumption still remains that the interests of young children will best be served by keeping them with their mother. That presumption acknowledges that the biological and physical connection between mother and baby creates a bond that should not be severed too soon, unless there are exceptional circumstances.

The special nature of this bond is long established and the way in which a society treats its mothers and children has traditionally been a mark of its values. Yet the demands of equality threaten to weaken that bond, as mothers are put under both social and economic pressure to return to paid work.

Last month’s Equalities Review, from the new Commission for Equality and Human Rights, lamented the continuing disparity between work rates of mothers and other women. It claimed that this disparity results from discrimination, not maternal choice. Although surveys continue to find that most working mothers would rather spend more time at home, both the commission and the government claim that the economy cannot function unless more mothers return to work sooner.

Jim Murphy, the welfare minister, last week reiterated that mothers must work their way out of poverty. Having built an entire welfare system on the assumption that families are irrelevant, Gordon Brown has been confronted with new figures showing that, far from meeting his targets, child poverty actually increased last year. Now he may be wondering if it would have been better to encourage fathers to stay with their families rather than letting the state take their place.

Mothers must be either well-off or unusually determined if they are to succeed in maintaining the maternal bond until their children reach school age. But if it is hard for women to achieve full-time motherhood, it has surely become even more difficult for men to support them in that role.

We have a tax system that denies any concessions to one-earner families. And it is all but impossible for a father to admit that he would rather his children were cared for by their mother than in a nursery or by a nanny. Just as Stewart’s talk of chivalry on the front line makes him sound old-fashioned, so a man who prefers to act as family breadwinner rather than nurturer risks being branded a throwback.

All the same — whisper it quietly — Stewart’s reaction may in reality be closer to the feelings of many young men in action today than the equal rights theorists suppose. And however hard we try to set it aside, our unease at the prospect of young mothers going into war zones might be a sign of civilised values, rather than evidence of a failure to keep pace with change.

Minette Marrin is away

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