| New York Times Front Page, October 9, 1998 Hare Krishna Faith Details Past Abuse at Boarding Schools By LAURIE GOODSTEIN In its own official journal, the Hare Krishna movement has publishedan unusually candid expose detailing widespread physical, emotional andsexual abuse of children who were sent to live in the group's boardingschools in the United States and India in the 1970s and 1980s. Parents were often unaware of the abuse because they were travelingaround soliciting donations for their guru's books, in airports and onthe streets, leaving their children in the care of Hare Krishna monks andyoung devotees who had no training in educating children and often resentedthe task, the report says. The movement's leadership was first forced to confront the victims ofabuse at a meeting in May 1996, when a panel of 10 former Krishna pupilstestified that they had been regularly beaten and caned at school, deniedmedical care and sexually molested and raped homosexually at knife point. "I remember being made to sleep naked in a cold bathtub for a month,"Jahnavi Dasi, 26, who was sent to a Krishna boarding school in Los Angelesat age 4, said in an interview Thursday. "I had wet my bed, and it waseasier for them to make me sleep in the tub than to change my sheets." Ms. Dasi also told the leadership meeting in 1996 that she wound upin a diabetic coma for three weeks after her teachers insisted that herhealth problems were a ruse to avoid cleaning the school and chanting inthe temple. "They neglected to take me to a doctor, so I ended up in acoma," at which time she was taken to a hospital, she said. The Hare Krishna movement, a Hindu sect brought to the United Statesby the Indian guru A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami in the 1960s, is now acknowledgingthat the legacy of abuse and the leadership's failure to grapple with itearlier have led many Hare Krishna children and their parents in this countryto abandon the faith. "Many people don't trust the leadership," E. Burke Rochford Jr., a sociologistof religion at Middlebury College in Vermont, the author of one of thetwo studies published in the most recent Krishna journal, said Thursday."They don't trust the movement, and people have become estranged as a consequence.The children who in all probability would have been more likely to embracethe movement in the long term, some of them have withdrawn." The movement now claims an estimated 90,000 followers in the UnitedStates, of whom only about 800 live full time in the group's 45 Americanspiritual communities, called ashrams. At the movement's peak in the United States in the late 1970s, about 10,000 devotees lived in Americanashrams, but most now live and work in the secular world. Another significantshift is that where once the movement in the United States consisted almostentirely of Anglo converts to Hinduism, about half of the people now worshippingin Krishna temples in the United States are recent immigrants from Indiaand Asia. In recent years, the Krishna movement has experienced its biggest growthin Eastern Europe and in India, where it was once regarded with disdainby native Hindus. Internationally, there are now an estimated 1 millionadherents to the Hare Krishna movement, known formally as ISKCON, or theInternational Society of Krishna Consciousness. Public revelations of sexual abuse by clergymen have plagued religiousgroups from the Roman Catholic Church to the United Methodist Churchin the last decade. But it is rare for a religious organization to chooseto disclose the extent and causes of systemic child abuse in its officialpublication. "We need to get to the bottom of it," said Anuttama Dasa, the NorthAmerican director of communications for ISKCON, "and to the best of ourability do whatever we can to try to repair the damage to the kids andshow them we do care as a religious society." Several schools with dedicated, loving teachers avoided any allegationsof abuse, Rochford wrote. But severe sexual and physical abuse was commonat the gurukulas, as Krishna boarding schools are called, in India, wheremany American adherents sent their adolescent boys. When children triedto send letters home sharing their misery, some schools in India censoredthe letters, Rochford said. The highest levels of abuse in American gurukulaswere reported in Dallas, Seattle and New Vrindaban, W.Va. In 1997, the movement established a Child Protection Office in Alachua,Fla., the site of one of the most thriving Krishna communities remaining.The office helps Krishna temple leaders identify and prevent further abuse,investigates cases of past abuse, and reports them to local law-enforcementauthorities. Madrid hotel roomsThere have been several lawsuits arising from child abuse cases at Krishnaschools in Alachua and in New Vrindaban, W.Va., but they do not approachthe number or scope of such cases brought against the Roman Catholic Church,which recently paid $30 million to settle a case of sexual abuse by a clergymanagainst several boys in Dallas. "There have been a surprising lack of suits up until now," Rochfordsaid, "for reasons I don't fullyunderstand." The editor of the ISKCON Communications Journal asked Rochford to writean article chronicling the history and causes of abuse at Krishna boardingschools. "I think it's highly unusual," Rochford said in an interview. "I wassurprised that I was asked to do the article, and I had some reservationsabout doing it in an ISKCON journal. After so many years studying the movement,I knew this was going to be painful for people to endure." The reasons for the abuse lay in the very culture and structure of theearly Krishna movement, Rochford said in his article. The movement drewvery young devotees, many in their late teens and early 20s. Those whowere not successful proselytizing and collecting contributions on the streetwere put to work in the movement's boarding schools. There was no screeningof teacher candidates, no training, little financial support, highturnover and often as many as 20 students per teacher, the article reported. "The mentality of the time was that distributing the guru's books andengaging oneself in missionary activity was the most important servicethat one could be involved in," Rochford said in the interview. "People'sstatus within the movement was very much based on their ability to be effectivein those tasks. Family, the way we see present in most Christian traditions,was not valued in the same way. Sexuality and family were something forthose that were spiritually weak." Celibacy was the ideal, the article said. But to accommodate families,the movement's founder asked the Krishna temples in the United States toset up boarding schools modeled on the gurukulas, or Hindu schools, inIndia. The goal was to immerse students in the spiritual life, which SwamiBhaktivedanta taught meant cutting the "ropes of affection" between parentand child, Rochford wrote. Children were sent to the gurukulas as early as age 3 or 4, and visitedwith their parents as seldom as once a month, or even once a semester.From 1975 to 1978, 11 Krishna schools opened in the United States and Canada,with regional schools in Lake Huntington, N.Y., and central California. The movement no longer maintains boarding schools in the United States,and many Krishna families now send their children to public schools. Butsome Krishna temples do run day schools for students. Jahnavi Dasi, who remembers being forced to sleep in a bathtub, stillbelieves in the Krishna philosophy, and sends her 5-year-old sonto a Krishna kindergarten in Alachua. But unlike her mother, who was aKrishna missionary, Ms. Dasi lives in her own house, earning her livingrunning a computer business with her husband. Every day, she picks up herson from kindergarten. "The most important thing is that I'm here, I'm aware of what's happening,I'm monitoring the school, and making sure my son is protected," Ms. Dasisaid. "I wouldn't send him away somewhere else." |