Father of Elizabeth Smart focuses on empowering children

Ed Smart says forgiveness didn’t come easy for the two people who tortured his daughter for 9 months. Elizabeth became a national headline, shedding light on the frightening reality of child abductions.

“It was this emotional roller-coaster,” said Smart.

The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children reports about 800,000 children under 18 are reported missing in the United States each year. Of those, more than 200,000 are abducted by family members, while only an estimated 115 are the victims of kidnapping cases like Elizabeth Smart’s.

Today, Ed Smart and Elizabeth spend most of their time advocating to stop child abductions, taking that dark time in their lives and turning it into lessons learned they can share with others.

“We can talk to parents forever about what not to do and what ifs, but really, empowering a child can make all the difference because a parent isn’t out there all the time. We’d love to put this protection bubble over them and keep them in that so nothing happens, but that’s not what the world is about,” said Smart.

He is heavily involved with a program known as radKIDS. It stands for Resist Aggression Defensively. The goal of the program is to prepare kids for to protect themselves from potential abduction or sexual assault situations. The classes are brought to children and their parents by the training and development of nationally certified instructors.

The program is based on a premise of three main principles:

Nobody has the right to hurt you because you’re special.
You don’t have the right to hurt anybody else, but you do have the right stop them from hurting you. It’s not your fault, and it’s OK to tell.

The program doesn’t tell children what the instructors hope they’ll do. It teaches, trains and empowers the kids with real skills so they can recognize, avoid, resist and escape harm in their everyday lives.

Smart said as he teaches parents about radKIDS, a lot of them ask him why a beneficial program like this hasn’t been in schools before now.

“Public school systems are trying to do what they can. Legislatively, we’ve been pushing. Last year we worked for the passage of the Erin Merryn’s Law, which is to essentially see that some sexual assault prevention is taught. Now is that teaching them about sex? Or a sex class? No it is not. It is talking about prevention and what to do if something happens,” Smart said.

But the passionate advocate and father of six feels even more can be done to help our kids. He said education is key to preventing sexual assaults and abductions.

“Not accepting what comes from it and saying we are going to do something about it. It is about doing. It’s not about allowing it to continue on, or to put our heads in the sand and pretend it doesn’t exist,” he said.

Elizabeth Smart is now 27 years old. She wrote a best-selling book on her experience called “My Story.” She was married in 2012 and now shares her story with others hoping to show them that a fulfilling life is possible after going through such a traumatic event.

If you want to find out how you can get your kid involved in radKIDS or to learn more about the program, click here.