Anuttama Dasa, GBC and Minister of Communications
I was jolted into confronting ISKCON’s shortcomings in 1996. A dozen former gurukula students told their histories of being abused as children to seventy-five leaders at the annual North American meeting in Alachua. The vivid details of beatings, abandonment, emotional abuse, and sexual abuse were heartbreaking. Grown men and women were crying. Some fell to the ground, begging forgiveness from the youth for not being aware of the abuse and not doing more to prevent it. We were stunned. Abuse “wasn’t supposed to happen here.” Not in the Hare Krishna movement. Abuse happens elsewhere, we thought. In other religions. In other communities.