Honoring DNLCC and championing resilience, Elizabeth Smart moves DI Club crowd

“I was prepared for lots of things in my life. I knew if I caught on fire, I should stop, drop, and roll. I knew that if there was an earthquake, I should stand in a doorframe. I knew that I should look both ways before I cross the street. I had always felt prepared. But I remember hearing this strange man’s voice saying, ‘I have a knife at your neck. Don’t make a sound. Get up, and come with me.’ Nothing had prepared me for that moment, and I felt like there was nothing I could do except for what he told me to do.”

Elizabeth Smart has a story. It is one that shakes wholehearted faith in humanity, elicits tears from those who think they already know it, and defies the odds. But because she acknowledges that “everyone has a story” – whether or not it is shaded as dark as the one she involuntarily claimed as her own – she refuses to let that one guide her life or her legacy.

Her story today is about empowerment, resiliency, and a focus on the future. As a survivor of childhood abduction, Smart has inspired and motivated parents and law enforcement. In bravely sharing the narrative of her experience, she has impacted the strategy of authorities in such cases, underscored the place for resolute hope, and highlighted the role “everyday people” can play in finding missing children.

She brought that message to Charleston earlier this month, speaking to a full house at the Daniel Island Club, in celebration of the 25th anniversary of the Dee Norton Lowcountry Children’s Center (DNLCC). Located downtown, DNLCC is a child advocacy center serving area children who are victims of abuse and neglect. The center is multidisciplinary; children who come to DNLCC have nearly every aspect of the investigation and treatment handled in one facility (see sidebar). Named for one of its co-founders, DNLCC has helped over 25,000 children and their families since opening as a multi-stage effort of the Junior League of Charleston in 1991.

Applauding the great work being done at DNLCC, Smart opened her remarks with a reaffirmation of a belief she holds and witnessed as she toured the center earlier that day: “What makes us who we are isn’t so much what happens to us; it’s what we decide to do about it.” It is a notion she adopted just after emerging from her own nightmare.

At her home in Salt Lake City, Utah, Elizabeth Smart went to bed the evening of June 5, 2002 a typical 14 year-old. She was coming up on her junior high graduation and hoping that the transition to high school would help shake off what she described as an “awkward” stage of life. After drifting off to sleep, she awoke to that man’s voice. “Nobody ever told me what I should do if someone broke into my house in the middle of the night and kidnapped me out of my bed,” she explains. “Nobody had ever told me what I should do if someone tried to kidnap me, period.”

Following her abductor’s instructions, Smart left the house with him and the two hiked up the mountains behind her home. As they walked, Smart considered to herself the way stories like this played out in the news: a child disappeared, a search was put on and, a period of time later, a body would be found. With what appeared to be an inevitable fate before her, Smart actually asked her captor to just kill her then and there, so that her family would at least know what had happened to her. His response to her was chilling: “I’m not going to rape and kill you… yet,” following by, “I know exactly what I’m doing, and I’m not going to get caught.”

Recounting the next events – arriving at a grove of trees with tents and tarps, meeting a “woman unlike any I’d ever seen” (her co-captor), being instructed to take a sponge bath and put on a long robe – Smart stated that she had been operating in something of a haze. What happened next would startle her out of it. Her abductor stood before her, uttering what she recognized as marital vows, and then stated that they would consummate the union. Unfamiliar with that term, the teen was completely unprepared for what was about to happen to her. And when it did, she was equally unprepared for how broken she would feel in its aftermath.

“I felt like I had been shattered into a billion tiny little pieces,” Smart recalled before her audience. “And no matter how hard someone tried to put all the pieces back together, they would never find them all. It was an impossible task. And even if you got all those pieces back together, what would you see? Cracks, filled with glue. I would never be whole. I would always be broken, I would always be worthless, I would always be filthy.”

In that moment, it even occurred to her that the children she’d seen on the news – the ones who never made it home – were “lucky” to not have to feel that way ever again.

But as Smart sat there, cabled to a tree and crying, she had a memory of her mother telling her that she would always love her, no matter what. That voice in her head would prove louder than any other, and would ultimately lead to her survival.

“I had something my captors could never take away from me,” Smart stated. “They could never change my mother’s love for me and… I realized I had something worth surviving for.”

From that point forward, every single decision she made was to better ensure her return home.

After nine months in harrowing captivity, Smart was rescued on March 12, 2003. She’d spent a long winter in California with her captors, and they had just returned to Salt Lake City. Walking along a relatively busy section of State Street, the trio garnered enough attention for several police officers to approach. When questioned about her identity, Smart initially denied her own name.

“I had been so abused and manipulated for so long,” she relates, “and knew that if I did anything that my captors did not want me to do, they would kill me. And if they didn’t kill me, they would kill my family.”

She was still in the presence of a man who had committed countless, terrible actions with no one stopping him.

But after repeated questioning from the officers, the will to be rescued won out over fear, and Smart was removed from her abductors, who were taken separately into custody. Smart told the crowd how she was handcuffed and taken to a room at the police station, where she was left alone for time long enough to worry that perhaps she was in trouble and headed to prison.

“But I remember thinking, ‘At least in prison, I would have food, a shower, and warmth,’” she recounts. “Compared to where I’d been, that was a big step up.” Hearing her describe her reunion with her father as he suddenly “burst through the door,” and, later, with her mother who “looked like an angel,” is incredibly moving.

Though she began her address that morning pointing out how unprepared she had been for this unthinkable ordeal, it was what her mother told her just moments after their reunion that would prepare her to go forward with the life she desired: “What this man has done is terrible. The best punishment you could give him is to be happy. They don’t deserve a single second more of your life.”

It is a doctrine by which she lives today, and tries to impart to others. Now the mother of a 15 month-old, Smart will most certainly pass along to her daughter those notions of unconditional love and ever-forward optimism that her own mother gifted to her. Though it would be years before her mother would know it, those words saved Smart’s life not once, but twice.

Smart testified before her abductor, leading to his conviction and sentence of life in federal prison. The woman who aided her abductor was sentenced to 15 years in federal prison.

In addition to speaking engagements and continued consulting efforts with federal agencies and nonprofit organizations, Elizabeth has authored a book, “My Story,” and co-authored a National Criminal Justice reference guide, “You’re Not Alone: The Journey from Abduction to Empowerment,” which serves as encouragement to children who have endured similar experiences to know that a fulfilling life can follow tragic events.

Carole Swiecicki, Executive Director of DNLCC, reported that, after touring the facility the morning of May 6, Smart imparted some actionable suggestions. One such idea that the center will implement was to have a separate forensic interview room for teens, since the room that was being utilized for children of all ages was conspicuously geared more toward younger victims and would perhaps not make older children feel at ease.

Smart delivered high praise for DNLCC, heralding the center as “a blessing” for considering the needs of each and every child that enters its doors. Indeed, as it looks toward the next 25 years, Swiecicki avows that DNLCC will continue to improve its efficiency of response and depth of care, so that “each child has a chance to change the world.”

Changing lives after life has changed: the good work being done at DNLCC

• Children who are abused are twice as likely to be arrested for violent crime as adults.

• 1 in 5 children will be abused before the age of 18.

• 2 in 3 teen mothers were abused as children.

• The cost to society of child abuse and neglect is $283 million a day.

• In Charleston and Berkeley Counties, an estimated 14,000 children experience abuse each year.

Of the children seen at DNLCC in 2015:

32% age 0-6

46% age 7-12

22% age 13-18

49% African American

33% Caucasian

10% Hispanic

8% Other

16% Sexual abuse

34% Physical abuse

22% Exposure to domestic violence

17% Other

10% Neglect

Six primary functions of DNLCC and the questions they address:

• Forensic interviews: “What has happened?”

• Medical exams through partnership with MUSC: “Is my body OK?”

• Mental health assessments: “How am I doing?”

• Coordination of partner agency services: “Who will help?”

• Research-supported therapy and treatment: “How do we move forward?”

• Training for community professionals: “How do we improve our treatment of and response to child abuse?”

Want to help Dee Norton Lowcountry Children’s Center as it enters its next quarter century? Learn how to donate or volunteer at www.DNLCC.org.