| ERROR MSGReligious News Service original article Updated: Thursday, Oct. 8, 1998 at 14:41 CDT Hare Krishnas lift the lid on history of child abuse Mechelen cheap hotelsBy Ira Rifkinc 1998 Religion News Service The Hare Krishna movement, one of the most controversial religious movementsto emerge from the 1960s, has voluntarily detailed one of its darkest episodes-- the widespread abuse, sexual and otherwise, of children who attendedthe group's boarding schools during the 1970s and 1980s. Until now, only limited knowledge of the abuse by some teachers, olderstudents, supposedly celibate monks and other Hare Krishna leaders haddribbled out in court cases, media interviews with victims and academicwritings. But in the latest issue of the biannual Hare Krishna publication ISKCONCommunications Journal, two articles -- one written by an outsideacademic with long experience studying the movement; the second by amember of the group -- extensively detail the extent of the abuse. They also note the movement's long delay in fully addressing the problemdespite the acknowledged trauma suffered by hundreds of individuals andthe group as a whole through the wholesale abandonment of the faith byangry, disillusioned parents and their offspring. "Children suffered denial of medical care for life-threatening illnesses,serious bruises, lost teeth, broken noses, scarring from caning, repeatedsexual abuse and even homosexual rape at knife point," wrote BharataStrestha Das, a Hare Krishna since 1983 who has taught English literatureat the University of Massachusetts. "The perpetrators of these very serious crimes were none other than theteachers, the ashram leaders, the administrators, and in some cases evensannyasis (monks) and ISKCON gurus (spiritual leaders). " . . . An entire generation of children had been subjected to horrendoustreatment at the hands of those entrusted with their welfare by parentswho thought that they were doing what was best for their children." Middlebury College sociology professor E. Burke Rochford Jr. said in hisarticle that the schools -- known as "gurukulas" -- "were staffed bydevotees untrained and generally ill-prepared to take on the demands ofworking with children." The lack of institutional support for the schools"contributed directly to acts of child abuse by teachers," he said. As word of abuses spread through the movement, said Rochford, "someefforts were made to intervene. Yet this very intervention sometimesresulted in new strategies of coercive abuse. Most significant wasenlisting older boys in (one school in India) to physically abuse youngerstudents who were deemed troublesome and unruly by teachers." A Washington-based spokesman for the International Society for KrishnaConsciousness (ISKCON), as the movement is officially called, said thegroup's decision to publicly confront the abuse issue was made "toreestablish a level of integrity that the organization has to functionon (and) to educate people inside the movement so that this can never happenagain. "We didn't react as quickly as we should have, in large part because wedidn't know how to react . . . We're trying now to be pro-active," saidAnuttama Dasa, who said his stepson was among the physically abused. ISKCON is by no means the first religious movement born of the '60s toface the issue of sexual and other forms of child abuse. David Bromley, aVirginia Commonwealth University sociologist, noted the case of theChildren of God, a group based on quasi-Christian teachings also known asThe Family. The group has released internal documents detailing themovement's own widespread child sexual abuse. Chambre VilamouraNor are established churches immune from the problem. The Roman Catholic Church has long struggled with cases of priestsmolesting young boys. In Dallas recently, the Catholic diocese thereagreed to pay about $30 million to settle the largest judgment everordered in a clergy sex abuse case in U.S. history. But elements in thechurch have repeatedly been accused of protecting pedophile priests andseeking to keep information about such cases from becoming public. By way of contrast, Bromley said ISKCON's decision, no matter how belated,"reflects a decision within the organization that this has to be clearedup. They realized that the alternative is something like the Clinton thing;continual scandal that continues to ebb out and eats you up forever," saidBromley, who co-edited a 1989 book about the Hare Krishnas. hotels BergenThomas L. Bryson, associate executive director of the American Academy ofReligion, called ISKCON's decision to allow Rochford to detail the abusein the movement's premier scholarly journal "highly unusual." "It's rare for a group to invite an outsider in and give him carteblanche to say what he wants in one of their forums," said Bryson, whoseAtlanta-based academy is a professional group for academics whose specialty is religion. In his article, prepared with the help of student assistant JenniferHeinlein, Rochford said ISKCON's philosophical emphasis on a "renunciateelite" and its denigration of sex and marriage as symbols of "spiritualweakness" laid the groundwork for the abuse. "Children were abused in part because they were not valued by leaders,and even, very often, by their own parents who accepted theological andother justifications offered by the leadership for remaining uninvolvedin the lives of their children," Rochford wrote. In the heyday of the Hare Krishna boarding school system, children asyoung as 3 or 4 were separated from their parents and often sent thousandsof miles away to gurukulas established at movement ashrams, or spiritualcommunities, in India, North America, Europe, South Africa and Australia.Roughly 2,000 young people passed through the gurukulas, which Rochfordsaid were more "the functional equivalent of an orphanage" than educationalinstitutions. Freeing parents of the burden of raising children, noted Rochford, allowedthe saffron-robbed adults to engage fully in proselytizing and sellingHare Krishna books and magazines on street corners and at airports -- themovement's hallmark and, until the early 1980s, its predominant sourceof income. Rochford said some of the worst abuses at gurukulas in the United Statesoccurred in Dallas -- where the first such school in the United Stateswas opened in 1971 but closed by the state in 1976 for a variety ofhealth and safety infractions -- and Seattle. In Dallas and Seattle, where the school also has long since closed,"there were an awful lot of children with few adults, none of themqualified teachers or even interested in teaching," Rochford said."Theadults least qualified to do other things were put in the schools." Perhaps the most widely publicized abuse occurred at New Vrindavana, theshowcase ashram near Moundsville, W. Va., where the spiritual leader wascharged with ordering the murders of two Hare Krishna members after theypublicly branded him a pedophile. In a plea bargain arrangement, theguru, Kirtanananda Swami, later pleaded guilty to mail fraud andracketeering and is serving a 20-year prison term. But the worst abuse, according to Rochford, occurred in gurukulas inIndia, where adolescent boys -- on their own, far from their parents andin a cultural setting where corporal punishment is more accepted -- were"particularly targeted." To keep information about abuse from reaching parents, the Indiagurukulas "censured" childrens' letters home and forced them to writemore positive notes, Rochford said. Rochford said it is difficult to know how many Hare Krishna children wereabused, sexually or otherwise. "Clearly, it was extensive in particular places, although it was notsomething present at all gurukulas," he said. Still, "abuse directly andindirectly influenced the lives of a sizable number of children." Nor is it clear to what degree the movement's founder, A.C. BhaktivedantaSwami, an Indian guru in the Hindu tradition known to his followers asPrabhupada, was aware of the abuse. In an interview, Rochford said Prabhupada, who died in 1977, was at thevery least aware of reports of excessive "corporal punishment" throughletters he received from upset parents, although there has never been ahint of his participation in the abuse in any way. "He had an awareness, but it is not at all clear to me that he knewof sexual abuse. But he did know that things were not going as they should,"said Rochford, who has studied the Hare Krishna movement for more than 20 years. ERROR MSGRochford also wrote that "Prabhupada himself discouraged parent involvementin the gurukula," maintaining that away from their influence "a child wouldmore readily take to a life of spiritual practice and renunciation." Spokesman Anuttama Dasa said "Prabhupada was aware there were problemsin the schools, but I don't think he had an idea (abuse) was going on.He was juggling huge problems all over the world. When told of problemshe would tell others to go fix them. I don't think he conceived at allthere could be sexual abuse in the schools. If he understood that he wouldhave directly intervened." In any event, noted Rochford, the mid-`80s demise of the gurukulas --brought on by the movement's general financial collapse -- "all but eliminatedthe context" for the systematic child abuse he studied. Today, Hare Krishnachildren generally attend day schools and live with their parents. Anyabuse that continues, Rochford said, is "likely to occur within the contextof the nuclear family," just as it exists elsewhere in society. In 1997, in response to the history of abuse, the movement -- which atits peak numbered no more than 10,000 American converts and today claimsfar less -- established a Child Protection Office. Headquartered in Alachua, Fla., the site of one of the movement's largestremaining U.S. communities, the office helps fund psychological counselingand vocational and educational training for those abused in the gurukulas. Office director Dhira Govinda Das, who has a master's degree in socialwork, said he also helps Hare Krishna temple leaders establish systemsfor preventing and dealing with abuse and investigates cases of past childabuse that continue to surface -- and reports them to local law enforcementwhen applicable. "Practically every week we hear about cases we had never heard of before,"he said. "Some cases involve people still in the movement, so we're obligedto deal with them." Some 25 years ago Christopher Walker -- whose Hare Krishna name is ChaitanyaMangala -- was sent by his parents to the Dallas gurukula. He was, he said"four or five." He attended gurukulas in Detroit, India and New Vrindavanain West Virginia. At each school, he said, he experienced and witnessed sexual, physicaland psychological abuse. Today, he still lives in Moundsville, near NewVrindavana, but is no longer connected to ISKCON. As far as he's concerned, the movement's newfound desire to deal with its history of abuse is too late in coming. "It's always better late than never for the general health of a society.For individuals, it's different," said Walker, who owns a farm andmarkets incense and body oils. "For a large portion of people raised inHare Krishna, it's too late. They've left and they're never coming backand they have been damaged by it." |