Elizabeth Smart: Pro-Abstinence Sex Ed Harms Victims of Rape
In 2004, 14-year-old Elizabeth Smart was abducted from her Salt Lake City home, held captive in the mountains, and raped repeatedly for nine months. Since her escape, she has emerged as an advocate for human trafficking victims—and recently, a critic of abstinence-only sex education. When Smart spoke at a Johns Hopkins University panel last week, she explained one of the factors deterring her from escaping her attacker: She felt so worthless after being raped that she felt unfit to return to her society, which had communicated some hard and fast rules about premarital sexual contact.
“I remember in school one time, I had a teacher who was talking about abstinence,” Smart told the panel. “And she said, ‘Imagine you’re a stick of gum. When you engage in sex, that’s like getting chewed. And if you do that lots of times, you’re going to become an old piece of gum, and who is going to want you after that?’ Well, that’s terrible. No one should ever say that. But for me, I thought, ‘I’m that chewed-up piece of gum.’ Nobody re-chews a piece of gum. You throw it away. And that’s how easy it is to feel you no longer have worth. Your life no longer has value.”
As Jessica Valenti points out, the chewing gum analogy is a typical tactic employed by abstinence-only advocates to try to scare teenagers away from having sex. And while stunts like those are often delivered to coed groups, the messaging falls harder on girls: If one person is the gum, the other person chews. It’s difficult to add a rape exemption to that kind of visual. In the case that you’re abducted, does God lend you a fresh stick?
In the sex ed wars, we spend a lot of time crunching statistics to determine whether abstinence-only education is effective in encouraging teenagers to delay sex. We spend less time discussing its effectiveness in making teenagers feel like worthless members of society when they do decide to have sex—or, in the case of too many teenagers, when they are assaulted against their will. Forty-four percent of rape victims, like Smart, are under the age of 18 when they’re assaulted. “The best thing we can do is educate young people as young as we can reach them,” Smart said later. Survivors of rape and trafficking, she said, need to be “given permission to fight back,” and that requires them “to know you are of value.” Teachers “can’t start early enough.”
http://www.slate.com/blogs/xx_factor/2013/05/06/elizabeth_smart_abstinence_only_sex_education_hurts_victims_of_rape_and.html
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They made us watch a movie in high school where Ann was spouting her abstinence only BS.
She was talking through her badly fitting dentures.
Boys only want one thing, and when they get it, they will drop you like a used Kleenex.
You're worthless if you're not a virgin. If you go on a date, talk, bowl, do anything except kissing, because that leads to the ultimate horror--sex without the State Issued Official Screwing License!!! Quel horreur!!! 
I guess middle America loved her crap.
I got NO accurate sex education in high school. I graduated in 1972.
Like the movie where 2 virgins have sex in the back seat of a car, feel guilty and horrible and give each other VD??? 
Also, they walk around the school with white spots floating over their bodies, implying that they could sneeze on somebody and give them VD like it's a cold.
Nobody told me anything differently, so I believed I would be horrible and loathsome after I had sex for the first time. It happened after I got to college. Then I realized that was BS and I didn't have to feel guilty.
