Hyphens clarify compounds, they don’t create them. Grammatically, ‘child eating’ modifies ‘pedophiles’, the head noun. Reading ‘child’ as its own noun would require ‘a child’ or a different construction, which isn’t what’s written.

It says “stolen by child eating pedophiles”. The preposition “by” takes a noun phrase as its object.That noun phrase is “child eating pedophiles”. The head noun is clearly pedophiles. “child eating” is a modifier (a compound/participle phrase) describing those pedophiles

Hyphenation would make it clearer, but its absence doesn’t suddenly create a new valid reading where “child” becomes a separate noun or the main object

Gamer and yeah

You’re interpreting a child being the subject of the statement. For this to be true, the original text would need to say ‘a child’. Only then would the sentence mean there’s a child going about eating paedophiles