Reply #39: dsc, I think your response is the most reasoned...

[truth2power]

if people will just stop to consider.

There is something about PREYING upon a child that is odious beyond description. This is just my lamentable attempt to explain this, but here goes: I think it's something deep in our collective psyche that has to do with the survival of the species. If humankind had not possessed the uncomrpomising will to protect its young, we would not have survived. So killing or injuring a child engenders that primal instinct and we feel revulsion toward the act and the perpetrator.

As you said, children as a class are less able to defend themselves. Didn't Jesus say, "Inasmuch as you have done it unto the least of these, you have done it unto me". And, "suffer the little children..."

Everything else you said, applies.