Reblog: Elizabeth Smart & Tara Culp-Ressler

Having read Jon Krakauer's brilliant work on Mormon Fundamentalism, Under the Banner of Heaven, I became acquainted with Elizabeth Smart's case some years after it happened. Here she points out a serious defect in the conservative cultural approach to sex education and its consequences for victims of abuse. I don't know that other means than abstinence need to be stressed, because I'm not competent to judge that question; but the problem of shaming anybody who, willingly or not, has had extramarital sex, certainly does.