10/09/1998 - 2336

Hare Krishna Movement Details Past Abuse at ItsBoarding Schools

USA (VNN) - from The New York Times

Copyright 1998 The New York Times Company
 The New York Times

 October 9, 1998, Friday, Late Edition - Final

 SECTION: Section A; Page 1; Column 5; National Desk
 LENGTH: 1311 words

 HEADLINE: Hare Krishna Movement Details Past Abuse at ItsBoarding Schools

 BYLINE: By LAURIE GOODSTEIN

  In its own official journal, the Hare Krishna movement haspublished an unusually candid expose detailing widespreadphysical, emotional and sexual abuse of children who were sent tolive in the group's boarding schools in the United States andIndia in the 1970's and 1980's.

  Parents were often unaware of the abuse because they weretraveling around soliciting donations for their guru's books, inairports and on the streets, leaving their children in the careof Hare Krishna monks and young devotees who had no training ineducating children and often resented the task, the report says.

  The movement's leadership was first forced to confront thevictims of abuse at a meeting in May 1996, when a panel of 10former Krishna pupils testified that they had been regularlybeaten and caned at school, denied medical care and sexuallymolested and raped homosexually at knife point.

  "I remember being made to sleep naked in a cold bathtub for amonth," Jahnavi Dasi, 26, who was sent to a Krishna boardingschool in Los Angeles at age 4, said in an interview yesterday."I had wet my bed, and it was easier for them to make me sleep inthe tub than to change my sheets."

  Ms. Dasi also told the leadership meeting in 1996 that shewound up in a diabetic coma for three weeks after her teachersinsisted that her health problems were a ruse to avoid cleaningthe school and chanting in the temple. "They neglected to take meto a doctor, so I ended up in a coma," she said, after which shewas taken to a hospital. There are no longer Krishna boardingschools in this country.

  The Hare Krishna movement, a Hindu sect brought to the UnitedStates by the Indian guru A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami in the 1960's,is now acknowledging that the legacy of abuse and theleadership's failure to grapple with it earlier led many HareKrishna children and their parents in this country to abandon thefaith.

  "Many people don't trust the leadership," E. Burke RochfordJr., a sociologist of religion at Middlebury College in Vermontand the author of one of the two studies published in the mostrecent Krishna journal, said yesterday. "They don't trust themovement and people have become estranged as a consequence. Thechildren who in all probability would have been more likely to embrace the movement in the long term, some of them havewithdrawn."

  Mr. Rochford reported that he could not determine the extentof abuse but that a "sizeable number" of children had beenaffected.

  The movement now claims an estimated 90,000 followers in theUnited States, of whom only about 800 live full time in thegroup's 45 American spiritual communities, called ashrams. At themovement's peak in the United States in the late 1970's, about10,000 devotees lived in American ashrams, but most now live andwork in the secular world. Another significant shift is thatwhere once the movement in the United States consisted almostentirely of American converts to Hinduism, about half of thepeople now worshipping in Krishna temples in this country arerecent immigrants from India and Asia.

  In recent years, the Krishna movement has experienced itsbiggest growth in Eastern Europe and in India, where it was onceregarded with disdain by native Hindus. Internationally, thereare now an estimated one million adherents to the Hare Krishnamovement, known formally as Iskcon, or the International Society of Krishna Consciousness.

  Public revelations of sexual abuse by clergymen have plaguedreligious groups from the Roman Catholic Church to the UnitedMethodist Church in the last decade. But it is rare for areligious organization to choose to disclose the extent andcauses of systemic child abuse in its official publication.

  "We need to get to the bottom of it," said Anuttama Dasa, theNorth American director of communications for Iskcon, "and tothe best of our ability do whatever we can to try to repair thedamage to the kids and show them we do care as a religioussociety."

  Several schools with dedicated, loving teachers avoided anyallegations of abuse, Mr. Rochford wrote. But severe sexual andphysical abuse was common at the Krishna boarding schools, knownas gurukulas, in India, where many American adherents sent theiradolescent boys. When children tried to send letters home sharingtheir misery, some schools in India censored the letters, Mr.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 inAlachua, Fla., the site of one of the most thriving Krishnacommunities remaining. The office helps Krishna temple leadersidentify and prevent further abuse, investigates cases of pastabuse and reports them to local law-enforcement authorities.

  There have been several lawsuits arising from child abusecases at Krishna schools in Alachua and in New Vrindaban, butthey do not approach the number or scope of such cases broughtagainst the Roman Catholic Church, which recently paid $30million in 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," Mr.Rochford said, "for reasons I don't fully understand."

  The editor of the Iskcon Communications Journal asked Mr.Rochford to write an article chronicling the history and causesof abuse at Krishna boarding schools.

  "I think it's highly unusual," Mr. Rochford said in aninterview. "I was surprised that I was asked to do the article,and I had some reservations about doing it in an Iskcon journal.After so many years studying the movement, I knew this was goingto be painful for people to endure."

  The reasons for the abuse lay in the very culture andstructure of the early Krishna movement, Mr. Rochford said inhis article. The movement drew very young devotees, many in theirlate teens and early 20's. Those who were not successfulproselytizing and collecting contributions on the street were putto work in the movement's boarding schools. There was noscreening of teacher candidates, no training, little financialsupport, high turnover and often as many as 20 students perteacher, the article reported.

  "The mentality of the time was that distributing the guru'sbooks and engaging oneself in missionary activity was the mostimportant service that one could be involved in," Mr. Rochfordsaid in the interview. "People's status within the movement wasvery much based on their ability to be effective in those tasks.Family, the way we see present in most Christian traditions, wasnot valued in the same way. Sexuality and family were somethingfor those that were spiritually weak."

  Celibacy was the ideal, the article said. But to accommodatefamilies, the movement's founder asked the Krishna temples in theUnited States to set up boarding schools modeled on thegurukulas. The goal was to immerse students in the spirituallife, which Swami Bhaktivedanta taught meant cutting the "ropesof affection" between parent and child, Mr. Rochford wrote.

  Children were sent to the gurukulas as early as age 3 or 4,and visited with their parents as seldom as once a month, oreven once a semester. From 1975 to 1978, 11 Krishna schoolsopened in the United States and Canada, with regional schools inLake Huntington, N.Y., and central California.

  Some Krishna temples run day schools. Jahnavi Dasi, whoremembers being forced to sleep in a bathtub, sends her 5-year-old son to a Krishna kindergarten in Alachua.

  But unlike her mother, who was a Krishna missionary, Ms. Dasiruns a computer business with her husband.

  "The most important thing is that I'm here," Ms. Dasi said."I'm aware of what's happening, I'm monitoring the school andmaking sure my son is protected. I wouldn't send him awaysomewhere else."

 GRAPHIC: Photo: The Hare Krishna movement has admitted past abuseof children in its boarding schools. These Krishna pupils were ata Dallas school in 1975. (Skeeter Hagler)(pg. A16)