> It does not literally mean doing anything positive because it will benefit a child.

That, we don't do. When the state assumes, often through force, responsibility over children everyone seems happy that this is the result:

http://web.archive.org/web/20210809061557/https://www.kansas...

We do lots of things with the state "to protect children". With one MAJOR exception: actually taking decent care of children dependent on the state. Which, to me, really calls into question all these efforts. The number of efforts attempting to "catch" various problem situations for kids, only to throw the kids found into state care, which is horribly bad.

And whilst I understand that some home situations are indeed beyond horrible and kids need rescuing from them, if you actually go look at the stories of kids in state care, actual abuse is pretty rare. Actual abuse is much more commonly found in youth prisons than it is found in child services institutions. Poverty, mental problems and substance abuse by parents at home are the biggest problems (yes, each bigger than the stereotypical criminal reasons. And even the relatively small group of criminal kids outnumber actually physically abused kids 10-to-1. Kids abandoned by their parents, also a tiny group, far outnumber actually abused kids)

It seems to me the whole "protecting kids" is just a 1000 major efforts to catch people in bad situations ... and punish them (situations often not their fault, especially poverty, or certainly not fully their fault). Then, because the kids involved are an annoying detail left behind when parents are punished like, they are ... well, first of all, deeply hidden, far from view. Needless to say, once hidden they are not taken care of very well at all.

This is done so a thousand efforts, and the police and child services itself can continue focusing on the frontend and catching yet-another-new-kind-of-child-abuse to satisfy various interest groups. From the LGBTQ lobby (fortunately these days in the right direction: making sure kids are allowed to be LGBTQ, rather than as little as 10 years ago, punishing them for it) to saving money and/or trouble in schools (such as expensive adaptation of school buildings to handicaps), to helping courts enforce divorce settlements (when parents refuse to abide visitation rights for instance).

But even with very serious child abuse you have to wonder: the child protection system is saturated with violence, drugs and even prostitution. That means the system is not capable of protecting children from violence, drugs or prostitution. But nobody seems to care about that.

It seems clear that if the rule is introduced that the situation of the child must improve as a result of child protection or child protection must leave the child alone after 6 months or so, that it will shrink 90%+ in short order. Such a rule would have the enormous benefit that it would force child protection efforts to improve children's situations directly, rather than finding problems and throwing the kids found into an abyss.

So no these efforts, from CSAM to ... are just to punish people for not abiding by mostly cultural standards. They are not about protecting kids at all. The most generous thing you can say is that they sometimes make it difficult to profit from abusing kids.