child protection is one of the most important things if not the most important thing within the heart christian movement according to our vedic tradition according to the vaisnava culture according to the instructions given to us by srila prabhat it's a priority for us to take care of devotees especially devotees that are very vulnerable like young children and it's a horrible fact of the modern day world across the world in every educational level in every nation and every culture and every social strata in every religious community there is a unacceptably high level of abuse physical psychological
sexual abuse of children we've been victimized by that and our leaders and our members worldwide teachers family members parents administrators leaders of our society need to understand that we must be vigilant we must be proactive in ensuring that our communities are safe that our children are safe that our families are safe and that we guard against this horrible mistreatment and abuse of young devotees worldwide it's unacceptable we have to be on our guard and if we are so we can minimize it substantially um i've been involved actually in child protection for i think 1999 was
the first year that i got involved i did a training course actually here as a to become a judge for the cpo for the child protection office and you know it's very very hard to to quantify and say and and to exclusify and to rate all the different services that one may do in iskcon or that are available in iscon but for me it's very very hard not to always have a child protection at the very top of that list with all the other important services that go on for any society as we know also
just philosophically and culturally from shima bhagavatam etc that we're meant to protect the vulnerable in society and one of those vulnerable in society are our children and of course you can make an argument as to who's more vulnerable and of those seven categories of vulnerable people uh you know yeah who's the most most important but uh without even doing that children are one of those seven categories and they really really need all the shelter and protection that they deserve they expect it children you know just by their very nature that they're innocent essentially and they
they don't consider a danger really they don't consider that people are going to take advantage of them and what the speakers do horrible things to them and so therefore you know it's so important that we don't ruin their childhood and don't don't don't uh allow anybody to uh encroach on that uh sense of security and protection that they deserve so for me child protection it's just as the americans would say it's a no-brainer and it's just so so important that we have that at the front and center of our consciousness at all times to give
protection to to children just like within our own body we need to be aware that we can become ill or that there's diseases that attack us without knowledge of how different things are symptomatic of problems within the body if i get a sore throat i need to have the knowledge that could be a problem if i get a pain in my side i need to be aware that that's a problem the same way as a social body as a community we need to be aware of the fact that there are diseases social diseases for instance
pedophilia the fact that there's people out there in the world that target children as objects of their sexual violence and and abuse we need to be aware that those things are there and those people sometimes try to enter into our communities and we need to be on guard if we're not aware of those things if we don't talk about it if we don't educate ourselves about these things then we are setting ourselves up to have a lot of problems so therefore these this information among our community needs to be publicly understood it's not something that's
going to go away by you know not talking about it or having some kind of social cause these are the kind of things we don't talk about because these are the exact same things we absolutely have to talk about in order to protect our communities and to protect our temples and to protect our children the fact is that one reason the world is more on guard in protecting their children is because some of these child abuse cases this rampant child abuse that's there in too many places and too many communities around the world has come
into the public eye and no family no community no church no school no tradition wants media attention on these things but the fact is when the media has brought attention on these things it's helped all of us wake up to the fact that we're at risk and it's helped us protect our children so as a community we have to understand we must be proactive in protecting our kids and at the same time not have this idea that if something becomes comes out if there's an awareness that abuse may have happened within our communities it's a
sad thing that any abuse happened in the first place but we have to be proactive to make sure no abuse happens not worry about people finding out about it and reflecting bad upon our communities we have to be worried to make sure our children are safe that's the first priority and we should understand that actually the fact that the media has brought attention to this problem around the world that governments are drawing attention this problem around the world is a good thing and to a certain extent as the communications director for the hari christian movement
when i was on many many interviews about the past problems that we've had with abuse with the media i stress this point to them please educate your viewers educate your readers that this is not a problem with only the catholic church or the hari krishna movement or only america this is a worldwide problem everybody needs to be educated about it everybody needs to be on our guard to protect all the children all across the world including the hari christian children and every other child in the world it's sad that in that period of time where
there was so much abuse of our children in the 1970s and the 1980s that we didn't know more about how to protect our children and the way child abuse works the way abusive people infiltrate communities and take advantage of them and exploit children and exploit the ignorance of that community at the same time many international organizations media organizations people who know about abuse they appreciated that when this information became more known to us as a community that we were proactive we i wish we'd done a lot more in the early years i wish we'd known
enough ahead of time to completely guard against it but we didn't but when these things came to the attention the international leadership in the mid 90s there was a presentation to north american temple leaders by a couple dozen young people almost every one of them had been abused it really woke us up to the problems that were there that's when we really put things in full speed in terms of the child protection office children of krishna many many different efforts to make sure that the kids are safe so i've had reporters tell me that they
really respected the way the hari christian movement had responded to this problem that we weren't just trying to cover it up that we acknowledged that we had problems which i did on international television and national television north america many many times yes we had a problem here's what we've done to try to fix it here's what we're trying to do to protect our kids in the future and to try to make our own community more aware and communities around the world all the things that are necessary to try to protect the children across the world
very briefly i feel it is of utmost importance that the leadership sees that all aspects of their temple and their congregation are educated about child protection and by all members i mean members living first of all the leaders themselves have to be properly educated so that they can they know how to respond to situations that may come up the managers who work under that leader need to be educated the members of the temple if there are people living in the temple need to be educated this is like underscore underscore and then those who may be
living in the immediate and surrounding communities should be educated whether they're initiated or not congregation members should also be educated because why they come to the temple and usually they just think i'm in the temple and they let their kids loose they're not looking in the corner thinking up down or you know the kids are just they're not thinking about this particular possibility and they need to know that it exists and they need to be aware of how they as a parent can if it's not done we can expect some kind of reaction sooner or
later and being vigilant is not a question of of being paranoid or assuming the worst it's about protection protection means prevention i can give a cur a recent example that happened in a temple that i'm closely connected with that a person was allowed to come to the temple and move in he'd been in prison for 26 years nobody thought to ask why were you in prison for 26 years i i was away when it happened i came back and it just so happened the prison was called the temple perception to say that this person had
some mail to pick up so the receptionist said oh this guy's through the prison i wonder what he did and she googled his name and came back this whole case three counts of child molestation it's not that as devotees we don't show compassion and mercy we must show compassion and mercy but the compassion and mercy is sown is shown in many ways in this case instituted by myself by the way there is an active prison program going on for almost two years every week these people are getting exposed to the holy name prabhupada's books devotee
sadhu-sanga right and prasada it's amazing this place lets us bring in prasada so they're getting a lot of mercy but upon release it doesn't mean that going into the temple because as a matter of just knowledge you have to know that there's two tap two top categories of repeat offenders the top category is sexual offenders whether it's for children or adults these people are the most likely to repeat their crime and often it's quite quickly after release this is statistic the second category is thieves they're likely to steal again so the mercy should also extend
to protecting our congregation our members are our children most of all
