We always have treated our children as disposable. It was difficult even to prohibit factory child labor, which faced serious resistance from the courts. Some states are even reversing that. (Agricultural child labor is still legal.)
I good deep dive is the You're Wrong About on Juvenile Justice (here on YouTube.)
TL:DR we have a whole subset of crime for kids, delinquency which is stuff that's a crime for kids to do, but not adults. And delinquency crimes are totally used as a pipeline to get kids into the prison industrial complex.
Also, our public education system has always had containment as a priority. When kids are not working but their parents are, they get into mischief, and thus we needed somewhere to cage them. This, and not edification, is why school is mandatory.
Children have fewer rights than adults do, and the law enforcement and the justice system takes full advantage of that to exploit kids.
This is the United States of America.
The Satanic Panic was largely about the US public learning (and being aghast) that CSA is epidemic in the US. At the time, one in three women surveyed were sexually abused as kids. (There are several good deep dives on the Satanic Panic. I recommend the webcast series by Sarah Marshall.)
At the time, we just couldn't handle the notion that CSA was being done by people the kids knew (parents, neighbors, friends, teachers, ministers and so on), so we made up the mythology of Satanic Ritual Abuse, that there were these vast rings of Satanists (not the TST kind or the LaVey kind) who were diddling kids as a way to worship the Christian devil, and gain magical power. Americans were not prepared to acknowledge that the abusers were among themselves, and so they bought into the story.
Now there are CSA rings that exist, and the Epstein child trafficking ring is among them, but it's a smaller circle. The thing about being high enough in the ownership class is that legality (or morality) no longer is a barrier to getting stuff you want. And so there's a preponderance of drug use, of sex tourism, of sending gay kids to conversion therapy (or troubled teens to abduction/reformation camps). And so there are industries to facilitate these needs, because the demand is there and they have money to spend.
Moreover, the global system of capitalism depends on contrived desperation. Workers who are skipping meals are more eager to take on jobs that pay meagerly and are dangerous and arduous. When food, shelter, healthcare, etc. is a right, suddenly workers cost a premium. The same thing applies to sex trafficking. After the collapse of the USSR, girls from those countries were glad to put up and put out if it meant a reliable meal ticket. Single-digit kids were on the streets peddling sexual favors for lunch money. This was a font Epstein tapped for his service staff. The more desperate the girls were, the less grooming they required.
Hopefully, this is the moment we figure it out, that as long as we have an owner class, we're going to have systems of contrived desperation to drive bonded servitude, including child trafficking. Especially if the owner class is exponentially more wealthy than the worker class. Maybe this is the moment we are able to collectively develop class consciousness, since it directly serves to protect our children.