I was in Mormon brain jail concurrently to when Elizabeth Smart was kidnapped and held, as it turned out, like 20 miles away from us. We would see billboards when we were driving past in our big white institution van, and we would see magazines in the checkout aisle, on the rare occasions we were allowed to enter shops accompanied, about Elizabeth Smart being held somewhere by some guy. This teenage girl who had been kidnapped and brainwashed and held basically in the next valley over. I don't remember how long she was with him, but this was when everyone was freshly looking for her and panicking about how she had been abducted and was being held against her will and brainwashed. Her picture was EVERYWHERE.
So. Imagine dozens of other teenage girls, being held against their will and brainwashed in Utah, seeing these billboards and going, "huh. I'm having a complicated emotional reaction to all of this. It's possible that I might unpack that in two to three decades."
Both of these situations arise from the same societal attitudes. This guy wanted a teenage girl to be trapped with him and unable to leave, regardless of her feelings on the matter, and for her to act a certain way and comply with his desires. He took her from her home and forced her to be somewhere she did not want to be and would not let her go, and he tried to turn her into a different thing. The difference in societal reactions to when one specific, unauthorized guy does this, compared to when someone's parents pay a fancy sounding institution to do it for them, tells you a lot about how we think about the autonomy of teenage girls.
In Utah, the reason these types of institutions are allowed is because their youth rights laws are abysmal even compared to the rest of the US. Children aren't people, they're the property of their parents. Elizabeth Smart's parents didn't want her to be kidnapped, so it was bad. Our parents did want us to be kidnapped, so it was fine.
Elizabeth Smart’s kidnapper’s crime was that he didn’t go through the established system for kidnapping and brainwashing teenage girls. This is not even a little bit hyperbolic.
