Sunday, June 2, 2019

Ellen Degeneres On Believing Abuse Victims

https://www.yahoo.com/news/ellen-degeneres-apos-mom-message-153418064.html

PADA: Many GBC victims of abuse told me this was a big problem. They would tell their parents and / or ISKCON leaders they were victims of an abuse situation, and "no one listened to us, no one believed us." Later on, a few of us, like me and Sulochana, we did believe them. Yet we could not "move a mountain" and get people to report these issues to the authorities, make lawsuits and so forth. So these problems festered and grew. 

Of course Chakradhari, Sulochana and maybe others who tried to bring this issue to the attention of the devotee community were branded as renegades and / or murdered. That made it harder for anyone else to come forward, fearing severe reprisals.

Some parents told me they did believe their children, but they simply silently withdrew their children, but made no police reports or public warnings to others of the problem. So that made a sort of cover up process, and their children were also often ordered to keep silent. This is what Sanaka Rsi calls "the conspiracy of silence."    

Worse, many parents then got their children to worship people like Radhanath, Narayan Maharaja, and others who were the biggest cheer leaders of the whole GBC molester guru regime. Notice also that a lot of people said we were "liars" for representing these victims in the 1980s, and they still say we are liars now. That means they suppressed the whole issue then, and many still are. Anyway, hopefully this will be a good lesson for the Vaishnava community, when children report abuse, it should be taken more seriously. 

And when people like us act as representing agents of these victims, we should be taken more seriously as well. The only good news now is, the devotee community has sort of been forced to confront the issue now, only because it had become a giant public media spectacle, which is apparently what it sometimes takes to wake people up on important issues. 

We warned people even way back in 1980 that if they did not address this abuse issue, and forcing children to worship deviants as their acharyas etc., it would explode eventually into a public media process, but they were like Ellen's mom, they did not believe us. The rest is history.

ys pd

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