I was a child when I attended with my mother. There are some stellar elders. The majority were under-educated, felt threatened by a 12 year old's questions; overly controlling.
I had back in the day a skirt that came mid-knee with a two inch slit. Mind you, I was not a Witness. Two of the elders took me aside, without my mother, and yelled at me over the skirt. My mother found out and got in their face. They were somewhat afraid of my mother, a school district administrator.
I was attracted to the religion when we first started attending. I read everything. One of the books I read was Rutherford's Riches. Eventually, as I read, I asked myself, How does he know this stuff? The answer was, He doesn't. He made it up. But I asked one of the elders, a man named Allan who had daughters my age, how he knew it was true. His answer was, Oh, don't read that old stuff. Everything has changed. I realize a person's understanding changes with further knowledge, but truth does not change. Truth is truth. If God did not bless them with truth in the past, what evidence was there that he did now. I made the mistake of asking that. The result was distressing. If a pastor must verbally abuse a child over a question of faith, then the pastor's faith is shallow, even unfounded.
Despite some knowledgeable elders, one of them my uncle, I found and still find most elders to be controlling, rather ignorant of their own religion, and self-entitled. Needless to say, by the time I was 12 I was certain I'd never become a Witness.
Having said that, I'm not unsympathetic. I have no problem with seeing most of them as earnest Christians. They, however, do not see me that way. They see me as, one older Witness woman said, as 'crow food.'
Years later, when I was teaching a middle-school literature class focused on 20th Century YA books, two Witness elders complained about the content, first to me and then to the principal and finally to the school board. What was so shocking about content? Two of the books I assigned were by Anne McCaffery, the first two of her young peoples' Pern stories about a young girl who wants to become a 'Harper.' They were rebuffed by the school district, and eventually I applied for an got a no contact order from the courts. It is still in force.
More recently there has been low level harassment from a Brazilian elder who wanted to turn my history blog to a forum for his 'Witnessing.' http://truthhistory.blogspot.com/2018/10/obviously-time-to-restate-rules.html?showComment=1540321127674#c3954264481611478919