What kid hasn't fantasized about escaping the tyranny of parents, the shackles of school, and the general feeling that your life is not your own? When I was 10, I'd tie a handkerchief around the end of a branch and parade around the block with it propped up on my shoulder as if I were a young boxcar bandit, off to start a new life.

But then, like Max grown weary of the Wild Things, I'd come home for dinner. The fantasy was enough to keep me from actually doing it, and frankly, I didn't have much reason to run away.

Sadly, this isn't the case for as many as 1.6 million American youth. (It's impossible to know the exact figure because homeless people -- especially youth -- are often hard to locate.) For them, life on the street or in the woods is a grim reality, often accompanied by violence, prostitution and drugs. What's worse, such a life is sometimes preferable to what they left behind: parents who beat them, starved them, or simply ignored them.

The New York Times published two front-page stories this week on the plight of homeless teens and pre-teens. The first offers a harrowing look at why these kids run away, citing the economic crisis as a key factor in their unhappiness at home. As an ex-girlfriend's father once warned me during a period of unemployment: "When hunger knocks on the door, love flies out the window."

He was right, and his daughter and I broke up within three months - but we were just dating. I shudder to think that the maxim holds for actual kin, but that very well might be the case.

The second Times story focuses on prostitution, relating the stories of teenage girls who were seduced by men who promised to care for them but wound up selling their bodies. The girls, meanwhile, didn't leave because the men provided basic needs: shelter, food, and companionship. A basic sense of security and belonging -- strong medicine for a scared teen on the lam.

On a related note, more than 700 arrests were made this week in a nationwide sting on child prostitution, rescuing 56 girls -- some as young as I was when I pretended to be a hobo. The investigation spanned 36 cities and involved 1,600 agents and officers from the FBI, local law enforcement agencies and the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children.

Very Young Girls, a documentary released in 2007, focuses on this phenomenon in New York City, profiling a group of girls who entered "the life," in some cases, as young as 12 years old. Lacking strong parental figures, many of them were preyed upon by pimps who became their fathers, boyfriends and bosses all at once. The saddest part is that some of the girls won't leave because they've never known such security, even after people try to rescue them.

In My Shoes is another recent documentary that attempts to show teen homelessness from the teens' perspective. The point being that if we can understand why these kids run away, maybe we can actually help them instead of merely rounding them up and sending them home to lives that may be more dangerous than what they find in our nation's bus depots and alleyways.

I think back on a film I saw when I was 18, Where the Day Takes You, about a group of runaway teens in Los Angeles. The 1992 movie stars Dermot Mulroney and Will Smith, and while it does depict the hardships of life on the street, it also makes the life look kind of awesome. I even knew a guy in high school who was so inspired by the film that he resolved to move to LA and live among homeless teens for a year so he could write a Hunter S. Thompson-esque book about it later. (I don't believe he followed through.)

Teen homelessness is a crisis, the harrowing realities of which no Hollywood movie can capture. Perhaps with stories like those in the Times this week and documentaries like the ones mentioned above, we can begin imagining some real solutions. Clearly, lives depend on it.

[Image: Monica Almeida for the New York Times]