Caption: Elizabeth Smart

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As police in New York City make an arrest in case of Etan Patz, Elizabeth Smart, perhaps America’s most famous missing child, opens up about why she wants to help other families protect their kids.  

“I know what I went through and I know that that happens to children every day, all the time,” Smart tells 48 HOURS CRIMESIDER blog in an interview tied to the anniversary of National Missing Children’s Day. “And it shouldn’t be happening to children. Children are the last people who should be getting hurt.”

Smart is a supporter of radKIDS (Resisting Aggression Defensively), a nonprofit organization that provides children and their families with safety training. One of the main principles of the program is that no one has the right to hurt a child. Looking back today, Smart says if she had the training as a child she might have known what to do the night she was abducted from her Salt Lake City bedroom. She was held captive for nine months.

“I would have known that I could have yelled…. Maybe I would have fought back,” Smart says in a videotaped interview with CRIMESIDER. “Or maybe we would have gotten outside of my house. And then I would have tried to run away. Or maybe – I mean, I think there’s probably a hundred different things that could have taken place that night instead of what did take place.”

National Missing Children’s Day was founded in 1983 and falls annually on the anniversary of the missing of six-year-old Patz, who left for school on May 25, 1979 and never returned.  His case went unsolved for 33 years. Now, decades later, the New York City Police Department has announced the arrest of a 51-year-old man who allegedly confessed to murdering the little boy.

Smart tells CRIMESIDER, available on CBSNews.com, she wants children to know it is okay to do “whatever they need to do to feel safe, whether it’s screaming or kicking or going and finding an adult to come in and help the situation, I want them to have the confidence to do that.”

She also tells CRIMESIDER it’s important for the parents of missing children to remain positive, something the families of missing children Shawn Hornbeck and Jaycee Dugard never lost sight of.

“I think that hope is the most important thing,” Smart says. “And because of people like Shawn Hornbeck and Jaycee Dugard  – there are children out there who are still alive and who are still waiting to be home, [to] come home.  And I mean, what if someone had given up on any one of these children?  What if some – what if everyone gave up on me? Where would I be?  Would I be alive?  I don't know.”

“But I think hope is one of the most important things we can have in child abduction cases, because you just never know,” Smart adds. “You very well could be the exception to the statistic.”

CRIMESIDER was created by the team behind 48 HOURS MYSTERY and delivers the latest news on the most riveting crime stories as they unfold.

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Press Contact:  Richard Huff     212-975-3328    huffr@cbsnews.com