The Community Foundation of Southwest Colorado chose a difficult topic for the 2024 edition of its annual Making a Difference speaker series on Tuesday: “The Journey of Abduction to Empowerment.”
But a panel of Durango-area leaders in child safety and sexual assault survivor advocacy, joined by survivor Elizabeth Smart, handled the sensitive subject with finesse and expertise.
October has been recognized as Domestic Violence Awareness Month since U.S. Congress declared it so in 1989, according to the Domestic Violence Awareness Project.
“Every October, organizations and individuals unite across the country for a national effort to uplift the needs, voices, and experiences of survivors,” DVAP said on a webpage describing this year’s domestic violence awareness theme of “Heal, Hold & Center.”
Smart, who was abducted from her Salt Lake City home at age 14 in 2002 and survived nine months imprisoned by her captors, recounted her incredible story of endurance. After her talk, Smart and area experts from the Sexual Assault Services Organization, 4 the Children, La Plata County Health Department and Durango School District 9-R fielded questions from the audience.
Community Foundation Executive Director Briggen Wrinkle, introducing Smart, said Smart’s story of abduction and survival was “one of the most followed child abduction cases in our time.”
Smart was abducted at knifepoint from her bedroom the night of June 2, 2002, and suffered nine months of rape, humiliation and death threats toward herself and her family should she attempt to escape. She said she owes her police rescue on March 12, 2003, to three people who recognized her and called 911. Each call was made within five minutes of one another.
“That ultimately led to my rescue,” she said. “So I do absolutely believe that one person can make a difference.”
Her captors were Brian Mitchell and his wife, Wanda Barzee. Smart said the night Mitchell abducted her and brought her to his discrete campsite far in the mountains, he told her she should be happy because she was to be his second wife and Barzee’s handmaiden, and it was “now time to consummate our marriage.”
Smart said over her nine months imprisonment, every time she thought her situation couldn’t get any worse, she was proven wrong and introduced to a new low of darkness.
So she changed her mindset.
“I started thinking, ‘OK, this is really bad. This is really, really bad, but I’m so grateful it’s sunny today because I’m not cold. I’m not cold today, and I’m grateful for that,’” she said. “Or, ‘I am so grateful that they gave me water today, because yesterday I didn’t get any and that was terrible.’”
She said she was raised in a very conservative community and was never taught the difference between enthusiastic, consensual sex, and sexual violence and rape. She heard so many lessons about the importance of remaining chaste and pure at church. When her captors abused her, she didn’t just feel physical and mental pain, but spiritual pain as well.
“I felt like I was genuinely ruined,” she said.
She said the morning after she was reunited with her parents, she was sitting with her mother, who offered a piece of advice she has carried with her ever since: “What this man has done to you is terrible and there aren’t words to describe how wicked and evil it is. … But the best punishment you could ever give him is to be happy,” she said.
Smart took that to mean she should never give up on being happy, and that applies to everyone, but especially sexual assault survivors. She said everyone experiences trauma, but that trauma isn’t deserved, it isn’t one’s fault and it doesn’t have to define one.
“Making time to be happy, to find things that bring us true joy, I think is important, because then when we find ourselves in those dark moments which will inevitably come, we can remember that happiness is real,” she said. “Sometimes it doesn’t feel like it is. Sometimes it feels like it is too far out of our reach to ever feel that again. And the truth is it’s not, and you deserve to feel happiness.”
About Elizabeth Smart
The Community Foundation selected Elizabeth Smart for its 2024 edition of its Making a Difference speaker series.
Elizabeth Smart survived an abduction from her home in 2002 and subsequent rape and sexual assault over nine months before she was rescued and returned to her family in 2003.
She went on to found the Elizabeth Smart Foundation, which aims to end the victimization and exploitation of sexual assault through education, healing and advocacy, according to the foundation.
Community Foundation Executive Director Briggen Wrinkle, introducing Smart on Tuesday at the Community Concert Hall at Fort Lewis College, said Smart helped promote the national Amber Alert, the Adam Walsh Child Protection and Safety Act, and other legislation to prevent abductions.
Smart recounts her experience in the New York Times bestseller “My Story,” and has worked with other abduction survivors and the U.S. Department of Justice’s Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention to publish “You’re Not Alone: The Journey From Abduction to Empowerment.”
“This guide is meant to encourage children who have gone through similar experiences not to give up, but to know there is hope for a rewarding life,” Wrinkle said.
– Herald Staff
After Smart concluded her story, attention shifted to the panel of area advocates and the audience for questions.
One audience member asked about an adjacent subject, human trafficking, its activities in La Plata County and Southwest Colorado and how to recognize it when one sees it.
Laura Latimer, executive director of Sexual Assault Services Organization based in Durango, said SASO partners with the Denver nonprofit Laboratory to Combat Human Trafficking to hold local educational workshops. She said a common myth about human trafficking is it is like the 2008 action/thriller film “Taken” starring actor Liam Neeson, in which a former Black Ops operative must rescue his daughter from sex slavers who abducted her in Paris.
She said human trafficking is more complicated than the portrayal in the fictional film. In reality, it often involves “push and pull factors” that suck one into human trafficking – substance addiction and coercion into committing crimes are often factors.
La Plata County Department of Human Service Child Welfare Manager Jessica Dalla-Cundiff said labor trafficking is more common in Southwest Colorado than sex trafficking.
She said there are different thresholds for any sort of human trafficking regarding adults versus minors. For adults, a specific element of threat or force is necessary. For minors, there must be an “exchange of goods for services.”
She said a typical labor trafficking example involving minors is teenagers showing up at one’s door selling magazines. Kids sell various things for school events and fundraisers pretty regularly – when they are selling something for an unorthodox cause or an unknown reason is when red flags are raised.
“If you ever have a concern for trafficking – labor trafficking, sex trafficking – there are specific signs. You just make a report to law enforcement or human services, and then we would vet that to determine if it’s something that we need to respond to and go out and assess,” she said.
Another audience member identified himself as an emergency physician at Mercy Hospital. He said he often sees patients who he suspects are in abusive relationships or troubling circumstances. But when he asks them privately if they are OK, they say they are. He asked Smart and the panelists if there are particular signs to look for to determine if a patient is in a dangerous situation and is unwilling or unable to say so.
Raven Nyx, SASO cultural outreach coordinator, said she suggests looking for tattoos – marks used by human traffickers to identify larger groups of people being trafficked. She recommended asking patients about their tattoos because most people have stories behind their tattoos.
“If they can’t give a meaningful story to a tattoo, asking them if they have their documentation, if they have their driver’s license. If they're an adult, do they have their passport? Do they have access to that? Are they able to withdraw money from their bank account? Do they have all of their financial stuff?” she said.
Children are more difficult, she said. Asking children to draw and asking them the same questions in different ways are some ways to connect the dots or piece together information that may provide a more complete picture of what’s going on.
Sean Hembree, 9-R student support services coordinator, added that children aren’t always aware they are in an abusive situation. And gaining enough trust with someone for them to come forward can take a lot of time.
“The trust will have to be in place, and it will come over time,” he said. “The trafficking cases with which I’ve been involved were also really, really difficult, because sometimes the student was not even aware of what was happening. It was routine. … Without exception, it was often others that recognized patterns and were able to go to the right people to initiate an investigation.”
cburney@durangoherald.com
