How Elizabeth Smart Is Taking On Rape Culture
Elizabeth Smart, a kidnapping and sexual assault victim who has devoted her adult life to combating human trafficking, made national headlines earlier this year when she voiced a critique about abstinence-only education. Emphasizing purity ultimately makes rape victims feel worthless, Smart pointed out, and that’s why she felt “dirty and filthy” after she was sexually assaulted.
Smart’s statements were so newsworthy largely because of her background. Raised by a devout Mormon family in Salt Lake City, Smart grew up within a conservative religious community and was taught that sex should be reserved for marriage. And predictably, social conservatives were quick to go on the defensive after the news spread, claiming that her statements about sex ed were misconstrued by the liberal media.
Rather than retracting her point about abstinence education, however, Smart has taken steps to expand upon the issues at the heart of her statement about purity culture. In an interview in the upcoming issue of the New Yorker, Smart explains that abstinence-only education is one piece of a bigger puzzle. She notes that’s just one of the multiple factors that contribute to a society in which rape victims are shamed instead of supported:
Smart told me that she wanted to clarify her point. She had been lamenting that victims of sexual abuse often feel that they are “no longer as good as everybody else.” Nobody should have the power to take away another person’s self-worth, Smart told me. But abstinence education was hardly the only way that victims of sexual assault could be shamed. A girl could be humiliated through social media — Smart and I talked about the incident last year in Steubenville, Ohio, in which high-school students recorded an assault with cell-phone cameras and mocked the victim on Twitter. Smart told me, “I can’t tell you how many women I’ve met who say, ‘When I was your age, I was raped, but it was kind of my fault, because of X, Y, or Z.’ And I just want to pull my hair out.”
http://thinkprogress.org/health/2013/10/17/2797181/elizabeth-smart-rape-culture/
As a side note, I've got maybe two individuals in this world that I consider 'Heroic' in the classical sense of the word (both dead authors). Ms. Smart happily ups that number to three.
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