Kidnapping survivor Elizabeth Smart urges parents to ‘practice SCREAMING’ with their kids to protect them against potential predators

After being kidnapped and raped more than 21 years ago, Elizabeth Smart developed a number of strict practices to protect her own children from the horrors she faced – including “practice screaming,” which she says is an essential tool for helping children to protect against danger from strangers. .

Elizabeth, now 36, was kidnapped from her bedroom in Utah in 2002 at the age of 14 and held captive in the woods for nine months before being returned to her family in 2003.

The child safety activist and author shares three children, Chloe, eight, James, five, and Olivia, four, with her husband, Matthew Gilmour, whom she married in 2012.

But in addition to the daily strain of raising three children, Elizabeth admitted that learning about stranger danger has become “one of the most stressful parts” of her life in recent years.

“When my oldest was three years old, she started asking me questions,” Elizabeth, who will appear on Fox’s America’s Most Wanted on Monday, told Fox News Digital.

She shared some of her eldest daughter’s questions, including: ‘What happened to you? How did you get hurt?’

“They were questions I didn’t want to answer,” the mother admitted. “I thought I had years to talk about it.”

However, Elizabeth acknowledged that the questions had forced her to have difficult conversations.

“Now I feel like I talk about it so much with my kids that they just roll their eyes at me,” she said.

“I said, ‘Do you understand why we’re talking about this?’ And they respond, “Yes, you don’t want us to get hurt. Yes, you don’t want this bad thing to happen to us. Yes, we know that.”

“But it’s so important,” she added.

Elizabeth added that she hopes other parents talk to their children as much as she does.

“(Hopefully) their kids will also say, ‘I know, I’ve heard this a thousand times,’” she said. “I think it takes a thousand times for things to sink in.”

Elizabeth founded the Elizabeth Smart Foundation in 2011, which fights sexual violence and promotes educational programs such as the Smart Talk podcast and self-defense training for women and young girls.

“One of the first things we have our students do is yell, because that’s one of the most powerful tools you have: just yell,” she explained.

She continued to point out that it is effective because “very rarely do we have someone who just screams at the top of their lungs and is not ashamed.”

Elizabeth added that there is usually “embarrassed laughter or embarrassed smiles” when someone first shouts, and perhaps the loudest person does so at “50 percent volume.”

“And if we can’t really scream in a safe environment without feeling crazy or embarrassed, we probably won’t be able to rely on it when we really need it,” she noted.

“So don’t be afraid to practice yelling.”

In 2002, at the age of 14, Elizabeth was kidnapped at knifepoint from her bedroom in Salt Lake City by street preacher Brian David Mitchell, who climbed through an open window.

She was held captive for nine months in a camp in the woods, where Mitchell performed a sham wedding ceremony before raping her for the first time,

To prevent her from escaping, she was tied up steel cables in a dugout full of mice and spiders.

Smart was forced to use drugs and drink alcohol, she testified in 2009, and was raped daily — as many as four times a day.

Previously, Elizabeth told of the painful moment she was almost rescued from her abusive captors during a run-in with police – months before she was eventually released – before the near-rescue was ripped out from under her when her captors managed to fool the police by disguising themselves as ‘servants of Christ’.

She recalled how a police officer approached her captors, Brian David Mitchell and Wanda Barzee, at a library just a few months after her abduction and questioned them about the teenager, who wore a veil to mask her identity.

Mitchell told the officer that he and his wife were “servants of Christ,” and that the veil was used to protect their daughter for her future marriage.

During the conversation, Barzee grabbed Elizabeth’s leg as a warning to remain silent.

This is when Elizabeth learned how the couple used religion to hide their heinous actions from the public, while Mitchell “just wanted to rape little girls,” she said.

Smart was rescued in March 2003 after a couple recognized Mitchell and Barzee from an episode of America’s Most Wanted and called the police.

Mitchell was sentenced to life in prison for kidnapping and raping Smart. Barzee was also in prison, but was unexpectedly released in 2018. Her first sentence would last until 2024.