From an editorial from the New York Times on Saturday, July 19th:

Of the some 1.5 million children who will run away from home this year, tens of thousands will spend time working for sexual predators and selling their bodies on the streets. According to one federal estimate, the average age of a child first used as a prostitute is between 11 and 14, but victims as young as 9 are not uncommon. Many of the sexually exploited runaways have been neglected or abandoned by families that will never report them as missing.

These battered children would have a much better chance to build normal lives if the country stopped treating them as criminals and began to see them as the victims that they clearly are.