It's not necessarily the question of owning the mind of the child. More directly, what I'm after is that once upon a time things went as they did. If we wish to speak of progress, there are ways it occurs, but think about how we get to the point of whatever you're describing as "target children to brainwash them" as an historical process. You are identifying, in targeting and brainwashing, within the standing and operating way of things. From a Sufi author:
The members of all communities, including nations and whole civilisations, are infused with the prevailing ideologies of those communities. These, in turn, create attitudes of mind which include certain capacities and equally positively exclude others.
The ideologies may be so ancient, so deep-seated or so subtle that they are not identified as such by the people at large. In this case they are often discerned only through a method of challenging them, asking questions about them or by comparing them with other communities.
Such challenge, description, or questioning, often the questioning of assumptions, is what frequently enables a culture or a number of people from that culture to think in ways that have been closed to most of their fellows.
―Emir Ali Khan
This is not an overnight process. What, for instance, would the laws look like to stop this behavior? And when in history would a society be capable of mustering such an iteration, and then we might start asking, compared to questions of data sets and subjective perspectives, the political realities, quantifiable and otherwise, of rooting the new perspective and consequences—
i.e., logical implications, including downstream and double effects?
In my lifetime, for instance, the brainwashing line would not necessarily have passed muster, as such;
only cults did that, not real religions, or something approximately like that. Now it does. In some settings. More than it used to, but still, try that one on network television, and there might be some blowback, depending on the political weather in the moment. In truth, that's a lot better than it used to be. Over the course of that history, though, the implications of making it illegal for "church groups to target children to brain wash them" are rather quite vast, and as the ranges both targeting and brainwashing behavior expand, perhaps the question is best to wonder who does not see the inevitable problem.
And we might speculate and argue about ranges and resolutions, but therein lies the question of when it should have become illegal. We can say it always should have been, but the question remains what it means compared to living circumstance and the historical record. When in history would, say, American legislatures, have addressed the problem to, as it is, your satisfaction?
Why is it legal? Because the argument to make it illegal has not yet prevailed.
Why not? People.
What does that mean? Well, these things take a while. Seriously, you don't just challenge the implicit prejudices and expect entire societies to smack themselves on the forehead and say, "Oh, what fools we've been! Here, let us correct that obvious problem we have been far too stupid to notice!"
Democracy has been around for how long? Why did the Athenians not vote for National Health? I think we're probably safe with hooting laughter and clinking pints at the absurdity of that question. More gravely, I'm uncertain what humanity was supposed to learn, but even more so the institutional capacity to learn, in the decade between what happened in Armenia and the thoroughly industrialized version spun up in Germany. On that point, I am more unsettled by our failure to learn since.
And it is within a similar framework of humans as individuals and collectives, the institutions they form, and our questions of history, that we find what you're asking. One of the most dangerous things about what is happening in the U.S. and other nations, with this far-right upwelling, is regression. We are losing some of the lessons we have been learning.
Considering potential ranges of what we might mean by targeting and brainwashing, I do not expect the institutions could have accomplished what you're asking about.
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Notes:
Khan, Emir Ali. "Sufi Activity." Sufi Thought and Action. Edited by Idries Shah. London: Octagon, 1990.
