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Elizabeth Smart’s abduction has impacted her life in more ways than she could have imagined.
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The now-28-year-old is opening up about the past and how her daughter, Chloe, helped her realize her parents’ perspective while she was missing.
“Nobody should have to go through the aftermath of a terrible crime alone,” she recently told PEOPLE.
Smart was kidnapped from her Salt Lake City home in 2002 and held captive for nine months. In that time, she was repeatedly raped and starved by her captors, Brian David Mitchell and Wanda Ileen Barzee.
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Now a true crime reporter, Smart admits that talking to the parents of victims has greatly impacted her since giving birth to her own daughter in February 2015.
“When I go back to my own situation, I almost think it was worse for my parents than for me,” she said, “because I knew that I was alive, but they didn’t know. I always knew how much they loved me, but until I had my own daughter I didn’t realize how all-consuming that is. The worst thing in the world would be if something happened to my little girl.”
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She has decided to continue her work with Crime Watch Daily because she feels that keeping the stories of kidnapping victims in the media will help solve some of the cases.
“I decided to continue because sharing the stories of survivors is a way to keep their cases in the spotlight, and hopefully give them a better chance of bringing criminals to justice,” Smart said.
“The power of the media is so strong,” she continued. “I know that in my own experience, if my parents hadn’t kept my story alive in the press, it might have been just another sad story that came and went. So the opportunity to talk to other victims and survivors means a lot to me and to them.
(H/T: PEOPLE)
