The protection of children by the state has been so firmly embedded within United States law, practice, and policy that nearly every aspect of childhood is regulated by it. Collectively, these laws and practices create a shared expectation of children’s experiences and development that, in their ideal form, should produce adult citizens in service of the state in terms of their health, intellect, morality, and abilities. At its crudest, certain deviations from the norms of childhood — sexual exploitation, abuse, and even some forms of juvenile sexual activity — have historically been addressed with new policy, law, education, and adjudication. Because there is a disconnect between the expectations of childhood and the actual lived experiences of diverse groups of children, these new policies, practices, and laws sometimes produce pathologies of child governance, defined here as unintended consequences and outcomes from laws and policies that exacerbate the abuse, delinquency, criminalization, and exploitation of children. I examine here one such pathology—the exclusion of a cohort of children, a subset of children involved in the sex trade, from treatment as victims and the subsequent protections afforded other children involved in the sex trade. I argue in this paper that through an examination of this pathology, we can better understand how a singular narrative of childhood—with its binary conceptions of agency and victimhood—produces outcomes antithetical to the intention of child protection efforts by the state.