there is a well known statistic that 40% of all policemen abuse their wives (and this is the number that is discovered.) given that the father's role in the family is as a cop, this role given to him as a reward for being a good boy and enduring the cop-ness of others from birth until he became an adult by acquiring property, its no surprise that fathers are responsible for a staggering majority of all of the harm (of all types) inflicted on children. the unquestioned and unquestionable bloody-minded authoritarianism of the nuclear family is the fascist cop in every one of our heads and it is the reason that we have always lost, and will always lose, until we are rid of it.
if you happened upon someone walking their dog in a public park and you saw them scream at it, strike it, drag it by the leash, you would be horrified and would correctly be extremely likely to try to act against it in some way. it is difficult to tell if anybody feels this way when a child is treated horribly in public because they turn their eyes away immediately. they fall silent, they act as if the crying is not happening, or as if it is an annoying noise from some ill-mannered creature that should be better behaved.
they think "who am I to tell someone else how to raise THEIR kid," because even more than a pet, a child is PROPERTY and it would be TRESSPASSING to intervene, as dire and unforgivable an offense as if you had just walked into the bears house, eaten their porridge, slept in their bed, shit in their toilet.
We know that fathers (or their surrogates, the authority figures the father hires to defend their property just like they would rely on a cop) are responsible for the overwhelming amount of harm done to children, even from the stats that are available, which undoubtedly leave out huge amounts of what happens behind closed doors. nonetheless all discussion of child safety revolves around the figure of a stranger, some attacker from outside who will seize this property from its rightful owner and do all of the violence the father does, but illegitimately and therefore unacceptability. they are joyriding in the fathers car, never mind that the father is a drunk driver, it is at least his car after all. the terrorist image of the stranger is just the father in a shadow.
people rush overzealously to protect the child-as-property from any effort it makes to reach outside the family, the same way people rush to defend a wendys-as-property, and by proxy its owner, when rioters burn it. "why are these ungrateful people burning THEIR OWN neighborhood?" just as they fail to question why the rioters do not feel any ownership of the wendy's, only recognizing the legitimate owners, those same people will never acknowledge the child's lack of identification with itself-as-property when the child riots against it. They will never dare to speak a bad word about the abuse they see administered in public by the child's owners - the father, the school, other peoples children deputized into this system with the promise of getting to feel powerful themselves. all of this is normal, is natural, is the kind of thing an owner can do with their property.
the result of this is that the father creates the perfect structure for sanctioned abuse, both within and without the family.
the child is forbidden information about their own body, which "belongs to them" in theory but in practice has already been pawned off in exchange for food and shelter and bare survival.
the child is desperate for information about themselves, about this body they supposedly own, but there is no safe way to pursue it.
seeking this information alone is punished with shame, terror, and the leather belt.
seeking this information from the parent is punished and the information provided under duress is always inadequate (here is how you can make a baby, here is how you can get AIDS, go do your homework.)
seeking this information from an educator is laughable because the educator is either the cop of the parent (only providing the same information above) or they become the stranger-attacker in an instant. can we imagine an educator telling a child "actually, playing doctor like that with your same age peers is normal, it doesn't make you or them a freak or a bad person, most people do this at some point" and not being immediately drawn and quartered?
so the child digs for information in clandestine ways, with the knowledge that if they are ever discovered doing so, they will be punished severely.
the father thus creates a prefabricated blackmail for any opportunistic and abusive adult to use against the child. this blackmail serves to keep the least curious children in line, and to cause harm to the most curious, so they can be made an example of. when it happens, the story will be added to the legend of the stranger-attacker, though just like before the majority of these adults are those who act as the legitimized cop of the parent in the first place, a teacher, a priest, any of the carefully-deliniated societally sanctioned positions whose contact with the child must go unquestioned in the name of property rights, and whose ranks are filled to bursting with shameless sadists as bad or worse than the 40% of police.
even in the staggeringly rare cases where the stranger-attacker is actually, truly, a stranger, they still serve this societally necessary purpose for the parent/owner - they are the bogeyman, the outside force that exists to punish unruly property for attempting to assert its autonomy before it has provided its full value to its owner. That value is provided in the form of unconditional "love" that can never be revoked, submission to any violation of bodily autonomy from imprisonment to "corporal punishment" to physical affection to worse - because such property only exists as a DEBT in the first place.
"I brought you into this world (because I very much wanted to fuck and to cum and fucking/cumming in a way that doesn't produce a child is a disgusting refusal of property rights. or perhaps I knew that and I wanted a person I could own and dress up as i liked and make do all the activities I wish i could do but i am tired from my job! or perhaps I wanted an insurance policy against growing old and rotting and dying alone, so I created an income-generating asset to support me through my retirement)
...and I can take you out of it." They say this, but we act like they don't mean it. They plainly do.
"who am i to tell them how to raise THEIR kids?" you, too, were considered to BELONG to someone once. you were considered to have thoughts and opinions and needs that rose from nowhere and ought to be ignored lest you get infected by the spoiled idea that you understand yourself. you have all the experience you need.