AUSTRALIA
ABC News
By Claire Aird
Thu 4 Dec 2014, 3:07am
A young girl was raped by the head of a global yoga movement, Satyananda Sawaswati, on his visit to a New South Wales ashram, an inquiry has heard.
The Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse hearing into the Satyananda Yoga Ashram at Mangrove Mountain on the state’s central coast was also told a group of swamis abused the girl in a ritual setting.
The girl, known as APR in the hearing, moved to the ashram with her mother, father and sister in the late 1970s.
The abuse started when she was three years old.
“The ashram was the kind of place that if you scream, no-one comes,” she said.
At the ashram, family relationships were broken down and parents separated from their children, who were routinely beaten, sexually abused and deprived of adequate medical treatment and food.
Note: This is an Abuse Tracker excerpt. Click the title to view the full text of the original article. If the original article is no longer available, see our News Archive.