Elizabeth Smart Teaching Girls, Women to Fight Their Attackers
Looking back on her abduction as a child, Elizabeth Smart says she doesn’t know if her self-defense training program would have stopped her kidnapping, but she does know she would have put up a fight and “that I was strong.”
She was 14 when Brian David Mitchell and his then-wife, Wanda Barzee, abducted her from her home in Salt Lake City in 2002 and held captive for nine months until being rescued by police in 2003.
Her kidnappers were strangers to her. But most victims of sexual assault and rape know their perpetrators.
“The sad truth is that — not all — but most sexual violence, most kidnappings that take place come from people that you know,” Smart said.
Read the full article here.
