It’s even more insidious than this. In many conservative value sets, children are viewed as property, and domestic issues are viewed as household business. Many many cases of obvious CSA (and physical abuse in general) over the decades have been dismissed as “I’m sure the parents know best,” or “it’s not our business,” or “I’m sure we don’t know the whole story.” It was only very recently that this veil was pierced even a little bit, but it was not without significant struggle. And even now there is a growing backlash to the idea that children are to be allowed any autonomy or agency beyond their parents. Many people still believe it is is ok to hit children, or that children should not be allowed to use a nickname in school. These are all vestiges or even new iterations of this exact same attitude which has enabled all manner of child abuse over the years.

Make no mistake, in the conservative worldview, child abuse is still, to this day, only bad if the parents say it is bad.