• News, recalling the wake of her March 2003 rescue, nine months after she was kidnapped from her childhood bedroom.
• She has been a longtime advocate for trauma survivors. “
• Smart is currently working with Portland, Oregon-based software company Q5id to market its Guardian smartphone app

 You’re not the only one if someone has ever questioned your decisions by beginning with, “Why didn’t you…? ” and you perceive it as a reprimand.

“I recognize—now that I’m older and I have had longer to process this—most of these questions, they were not meant to be rude, they were not meant to be triggering at all,” Elizabeth Smart exclusively told E! News, recalling the wake of her March 2003 rescue, nine months after she was kidnapped from her childhood bedroom. She was frequently asked things like, “Why didn’t you run?” or “You were taken out of your own house, why didn’t you just wake up and scream?”

“When I would hear the words, ‘Why didn’t you?’ my brain would translate them as, ‘You should have.’ That always made me feel very defensive,” the now 35-year-old author and activist explained in a recent Zoom interview, “and it made me feel like, ‘Well, wait for a second, did you think I wanted to be kidnapped? Did you think I wanted to be raped? Like, are you crazy? Who wants that?'”

Smart is well aware that individuals still don’t always communicate their curiosity in the most useful manner twenty years later. She counsels anyone who is in the position of receiving someone’s confidence to “take it carefully and sacredly”—and step lightly. She has been a longtime advocate for trauma survivors.

“It’s hard to always express what’s in your heart or the concern that you feel for them,” she acknowledged. “That doesn’t always come through in words.” It also took her time to accept that “no one’s a mind reader. So hopefully both sides can have compassion for the other. But just think about the questions you’re asking and the way that you are asking.”

And she has continued to try to advance the conversation or stop the unfathomable from happening in the first place after sharing her still amazing experience with audiences around the nation.

Smart is currently working with Portland, Oregon-based software company Q5id to market its Guardian smartphone app, a localized crowd-sourcing tool to assist find missing children and adults. Smart is aware first-hand of how awareness and everyday vigilance may save lives.

“Say your child, heaven forbid, disappears. You don’t know if they’ve just wandered off or if someone has kidnapped him,” the mother of three said. “When a child disappears, time is everything. If you don’t find a child in the first 48 hours, the chances of finding them in the future drop scary-drastically.”

But Smart was particularly intrigued, according to her, to the function that requires individuals to have their identity verified before they can join the Guardian community.

“If your child has perhaps wandered off and you can’t find them, you’re desperate and your heart has dropped right out of your body, and your stomach is cinched up so tight that you can barely breathe, and you send an alert out,” she added pointedly, “you wouldn’t want a predator that may live in your neighborhood to find out that your child has disappeared and has all this information on what your child looks like. So getting these identifications verified is a really compelling part for me, knowing that it’s a safe person who’s receiving this information and getting the word out quickly.”

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