Elizabeth Smart Trauma

A chewed up piece of gum is essentially worthless. No one wants to chew on a piece of gum that has already been inside someone else’s mouth, right? Well, how would you feel if your teacher told you that you were that piece of gum if you decided to engage in any sexual activity before marriage? Elizabeth Smart, a kidnapping victim who was sexually abused for years, was told this as a young girl by one of her teachers. Smart was taken in Salt Lake City, Utah when she was 14 years old and held captive for nine months. The strange part of her story was that she was taken outside of the house she was held captive in many times, yet she never signaled to anyone that she was the girl who had been kidnapped from her home months before. Many Americans heard of her story and asked the same question: “Why didn’t she run away when she was brought …show more content…
Smart was brought up in an extremely conservative and religious household, and her school taught an abstinence-until-marriage sex education program. Smart’s reason for not escaping her captor when she was given the opportunity was that she felt too worthless and ashamed because she had been raped. Smart provided this insight into her trauma while speaking to an audience at John Hopkins University. She recalled her teacher describing girls who had been sexually active before marriage as unwanted, and in her young mind she was a girl who had participated in sex before marriage. So when Smart was kidnapped and raped, she felt like she was that chewed piece of gum. An abstinence-only sex education made a victim of sexual abuse feel like her life was worthless, and there was no way anyone—including her own family—would ever want her, even though she did not consent to a single act that her captor forced upon her. This is just one example of the damage that abstinence-only sex education causes to young