It's been 14 years since Elizabeth Smart, then 14 years old, was kidnapped from the bedroom she shared with her younger sister in their childhood home, in the posh Federal Heights neighborhood of Salt Lake City. Fourteen years since she was awakened by a familiar-seeming stranger, with cold metal pressed to her neck and the following words : "I have a knife at your neck. Don't say a word. Get out of bed and come with me." Fourteen years since she was led away into the night, forced to hike miles up into the mountains behind her home, not to be seen again until just over nine months later, when an alert citizen recognized the face of her captor, Brian David Mitchell, from a recently aired segment of the television show America__'__s Most Wanted and made the 911 call that would end her "nine months of hell."

"I didn't talk about being raped; I didn't talk about being sexually abused," says Elizabeth Smart, nestled into a large outdoor sofa on the sun-soaked patio of her spacious home in Park City, Utah. "It's hard to come forward. That's probably one of the hardest things that I've ever had to do: to say, 'I was raped.'"

In 2013, seven years after the Nancy Grace interview and two years after her captor was sentenced to life in prison, Elizabeth published her first book, a memoir called My Story , which was co-written with Chris Stewart, a Republican congressman from her home state. In the book, Elizabeth reveals in her own words, for the first time, every painful detail of her abduction and captivity: extended periods of starvation and thirst, threats of death for herself and her family, and daily rape.

In the infrequent interviews she gave during those initial years back home—years when she was still just a teenager trying to make it through high school—Elizabeth did not discuss the specifics of what she'd endured, focusing instead on her early work advocating for other missing children. In perhaps her most notorious television appearance from those early years, Elizabeth appeared on Headline News with Nancy Grace in 2006 to speak about a national sex offender registry bill that she was championing, and instead was ambushed by Grace's inane and invasive questions about the burqa Elizabeth's captors made her wear in public and whether she ever wanted to scream for help.

The particulars of Elizabeth's captivity have been the subject of much media fascination since the moment that her safe return was announced on breaking news: the metal cable bolted around her ankle that kept her chained to a tree in the hills behind her house for months before Mitchell began allowing her to accompany him down into the city; the white linen robes and head coverings she was forced to wear as a disguise; the polygamous marriage ceremony Mitchell performed, sealing Elizabeth to him as a wife for all eternity; the biblical name he insisted on calling her—Shear-Jashub, meaning the remnant who will return.

"I was raised that way," says Elizabeth, who will be 29 this November, referring to her Mormon upbringing. "I did make that promise to myself that I was going to wait until marriage before I had sex... Well, then I was kidnapped and I was raped, and one of the first thoughts I had was, No one is ever going to want to marry me now: I'm worthless, I'm filthy, I'm dirty. I think every rape survivor feels those same feelings, but having that with the pressure of faith compounded on top—it was almost crippling."

Unbelievably, ever after Elizabeth was rescued, she was still made to sit through these lessons a few times a year, as a high-schooler in religious seminary classes. "You're like this beautiful fence," she remembers being told in class after she'd returned home. "And you hammer these nails in, and then every time you have sex with someone else, it's like you're hammering in another nail. And you can take them out, you can repent of them, but the holes are still there."

She often shares, as an example of what not to teach young girls, an analogy that she learned as a young child in Sunday school: "You're like this stick of gum, and if you have sex before you're married, it's like someone chews up that piece of gum, and then when you're done, who wants a piece of gum that's already chewed up? No one." That was the first thing she thought of after Mitchell raped her on the night of her kidnapping.

I was kidnapped and I was raped, and one of the first thoughts I had was, No one is ever going to want to marry me now: I'm worthless, I'm filthy, I'm dirty.

Most surprising for those who have come to see her as the poster girl for Mormon modesty is that she is taking the church to task on some of its more sexist teachings. "I think the power of faith is amazing, the hope and the healing that it can bring to people," says Elizabeth, who credits her everlasting faith for the strength she had to survive Mitchell's abuse. "But I also think there's another side of it that can be potentially very harmful, especially when a lot of religions teach that sexual relations are meant for marriage... It's so stressed that girls in particular tie their worth to their virginity, or, for lack of a better word, purity."

"Sometimes when I tell [my story], and I'm thinking about it, it just feels like a different life... Almost like faraway dream," she tells me. "I know it happened to me, but part of me is like, Did that really happen to me? Just because I think I've come so far since then, and I've just done so much. Sometimes it feels like it's a completely different life."

Elizabeth regularly travels across the country, speaking at universities and lecture series, to share the story of her kidnapping, sexual abuse, and survival. It is fascinating to watch past interviews and speeches––many of them have been uploaded to YouTube––because as Elizabeth has matured, so, too, has her message.

Elizabeth shakes her head. "I just remember thinking, This is terrible. Do they not realize I'm sitting in class? Do they not realize that I'm listening to what they're saying? Those are terrible analogies. No one should use them, period," she says. "Especially for someone who's been raped, they've already felt these feelings of worthlessness, of filth, of just—" she lets out an exasperated sigh "—of just being so crushed, and then to hear a teacher come back and say, 'Nobody wants you now'... You just think, I should just die right now."

She says she knows that her teachers never meant any of this with malice, but "statistically speaking, I'm not the only girl that's ever been raped. And those kinds of analogies, they stick with people." At that time, though, she still wasn't speaking up about her own rape—and wouldn't for several more years, until she testified at the trial of her kidnappers.

"The way we talk about [sex and abstinence] needs to change," she continues. "People need to realize there is nothing that can detract from your worth. When it comes to rape and sexual violence and abuse, that can never detract from who you are."

In writing and talking about sexual violence, people must make a linguistic choice in describing someone who has endured an assault: victim or survivor. Elizabeth uses both terms seemingly interchangeably, as in "rape victim" or "survivor of sexual assault." Though she uses both words, Elizabeth maintains that they're not synonymous. "I don't think they're the same thing; I think they are different stages, actually," she says. "A victim is someone who is still going through the abuse, and a survivor is someone who survived it. I'm not saying that they don't have hard moments still, or things to work through, but it's more about making that choice: that they want to survive, that they no longer want to remain the victim and they're taking the steps to move on in their life."