I think the hardest part about addressing child abuse is getting people to acknowledge, not just intellectually but actually responding accordingly, is that the biggest threat to children, the biggest risk of abuse, is family and parents.
it is of course most often parents who are crowing about needing to protect children (often against far smaller threats than family), and pointing out that they are, statistically, the biggest threat to their kids is not gonna be received well.
tbh I feel like most of society’s rhetoric around “protecting children” comes from the same place as deep-patriarchy rhetoric on “protecting women”, where the idea is that they’re sacred and valuable but also treated essentially as property, and the the desire to protect them is largely experienced as a desire to ensure that those property rights are sacrosanct
