Elizabeth Smart: Abstinence-only sex education hurts victims of rape and human trafficking.
Elizabeth Smart Says Pro-Abstinence Sex Ed Harms Victims of Rape
The XX Factor
What Women Really Think
May 6 2013 5:02 PM

Elizabeth Smart Says Pro-Abstinence Sex Ed Harms Victims of Rape

Elizabeth Smart speaks out against human trafficking and pro-abstinence sex ed.

(George Frey/Getty Images)

In 2002, 14-year-old Elizabeth Smart was abducted from her Salt Lake City home, held captive in the mountains, and raped repeatedly for nine months.* Since her escape, she has emerged as an advocate for human trafficking victims—and recently, a critic of abstinence-only sex education. When Smart spoke at a Johns Hopkins University panel last week, she explained one of the factors deterring her from escaping her attacker: She felt so worthless after being raped that she felt unfit to return to her society, which had communicated some hard and fast rules about premarital sexual contact.

Amanda Hess Amanda Hess

Amanda Hess is a Slate staff writer. 



As Jessica Valenti points out, the chewing gum analogy is a typical tactic employed by abstinence-only advocates to try to scare teenagers away from having sex. And while stunts like those are often delivered to coed groups, the messaging falls harder on girls: If one person is the gum, the other person chews. It’s difficult to add a rape exemption to that kind of visual. In the case that you’re abducted, does God lend you a fresh stick?

In the sex ed wars, we spend a lot of time crunching statistics to determine whether abstinence-only education is effective in encouraging teenagers to delay sex. We spend less time discussing its effectiveness in making teenagers feel like worthless members of society when they do decide to have sex—or, in the case of too many teenagers, when they are assaulted against their will. Forty-four percent of rape victims, like Smart, are under the age of 18 when they’re assaulted. “The best thing we can do is educate young people as young as we can reach them,” Smart said later. Survivors of rape and trafficking, she said, need to be “given permission to fight back,” and that requires them “to know you are of value.” Teachers “can’t start early enough.”


Correction, May 7, 2013: This post originally stated the Elizabeth Smart was abducted in 2004. She was abducted in 2002.

  Slate Plus