When I was young I got hit by a car. Remarkably I was not hurt that badly. I was walking along a sidewalk and the driver of the car didn't see me but somehow did see the parking space in front of the building on the other side of me. Don't ask me how that's possible. Evidently I was invisible in that instance. One second I was strolling naively along the sidewalk and the next I was rolling around on the roof of a car, which, I swear, is really embarrassing.

And what made it more embarrassing was that the driver of the car blamed me. He followed me for a block after that, hollering at me furiously. I know now it seems obvious that a young person should be able to expect to walk on the sidewalk without getting hit by a car, but at the time -- and this is the worst part of it -- I doubted myself. Here was an adult telling me it was my fault, and for all I knew I'd done something wrong. Maybe I was supposed to know better.

The next time I was about to be hit by a car I was on my bike. I did not end up on the hood of a car, but rather on the asphalt, as I had to brake super severely in order to avoid getting hit. This of course made me sail over the handlebars and land on my elbow, which broke like bones are prone to do when they hit asphalt from afar. The driver of that car stopped and inquired as to my well being, but again I was embarrassed and, because I'd been blamed for something similar to this before, I was not at all sure it wasn't my fault even though the driver was driving the wrong way down a one-way street. But I wasn't eager to relive the aftermath of the last time I got hit, so I hid my injury and limped away, grateful I wasn't being followed and hollered at.

So here's how it worked: The first time I was blamed for it so the next time I simply took the blame without prompting. The reason I'm telling you this is because this is a good example of how young girls think. As a general rule they think everything is their fault, and they will usually take the blame for anything. Another general rule is that once someone volunteers to take blame, people are usually very happy to bestow it on them, no matter how ludicrous it may seem afterward or even at the time.

Take Georgia's prostituted children, for example. Today Georgia has the highest rate of prostituted children in the nation. One reason, most likely, is due to the fact that it remains our practice to punish the child for their predicaments rather than the adults who place them there. This makes it a very favorable environment for pimps who sell children. In Georgia, pimps are rarely arrested, and even when they are, their cases are usually dismissed with a small fine, constituting an evident disproportion in the system's treatment of pimps and prostitutes. Regardless of whether the prostitute is a child, she is almost always seen as the perpetrator.

Recently there was a Georgia case involving two adolescent sisters, aged 10 and 11, who, like many, had escaped physical or sexual abuse at home only to be exploited on the streets by a pimp who ran a prostitution ring out of an Atlanta hotel. The police picked up the older sister after a man flagged them down to say he'd found a runaway child. The girl told the officer what she was doing and pointed out the hotel where she and her little sister were being held.

Remarkably, the police department did not investigate the child-prostitution ring being run out of a local hotel, but instead the officer simply dropped the children off at juvenile jail. The first sister – again, this is an 11-year-old child – was charged with providing false information and obstruction. She spent more than three months in jail.

Atlanta police complain that it's harder to arrest pimps than prostitutes, while prosecutors complain that it's too difficult to build a case against pimps because prostitutes are too reluctant or scared to testify against them. But another complaint, surprisingly ignored, should be that police and prosecutors are failing to distinguish between prostitutes who are adults and those who are children. Yet, infuriatingly, in the eyes of law enforcement they aren't seen as victims. They are seen as consenting participants. They are blamed for their own abuse. That they accept the blame doesn't give us the right to bestow it on them. They are children. They don't know any better. We are adults. We should.

Hollis Gillespie is one of Atlanta's best known literary personalities. She has published three books, and a fourth is on the way. Gillespie for years was a columnist for Creative Loafing. She now writes for the Georgia Online News Service and Atlanta magazine, giving readers her unorthodox and often-hilarious point of view on life in Georgia. She also runs a writing academy.   [full bio]