10/13/1998 - 2352

Hare Krishnas Reveal School Child Abuse

USA (VNN) - from Salt Lake Tribune

Saturday, October 10, 1998

  Hare Krishnas Reveal School Child Abuse

  BY IRA RIFKIN
 RELIGION NEWS SERVICE

  The Hare Krishna movement, one of the most controversialreligious movements to emerge from the 1960s, has voluntarilydetailed one of its darkest episodes -- the widespread abuse,sexual and otherwise, of children who attended the group'sboarding schools during the 1970s and 1980s.

  Until now, only limited knowledge of the abuse by someteachers, older students, supposedly celibate monks and otherHare Krishna leaders had dribbled out in court cases, mediainterviews with victims and academic writings.

  But in the latest issue of the biannual Hare Krishnapublication ISKCON Communications Journal, two articles -- onewritten by an outside academic with long experience studying themovement; the second by a member of the group -- extensivelydetail the extent of the abuse.

  They also note the movement's long delay in fullyaddressing the problem despite the acknowledged trauma sufferedby hundreds of individuals and the group as a whole through thewholesale abandonment of the faith by angry, disillusionedparents and their offspring.

  "Children suffered denial of medical care forlife-threatening illnesses, serious bruises, lost teeth, brokennoses, scarring from caning, repeated sexual abuse and evenhomosexual rape at knife point," wrote Bharata Strestha Das, aHare Krishna since 1983 who has taught English literature at theUniversity of Massachusetts.

  "The perpetrators of these very serious crimes were noneother than the teachers, the ashram leaders, the administrators,and in some cases even sannyasis (monks) and ISKCON gurus(spiritual leaders).

  " . . . An entire generation of children had beensubjected to horrendous treatment at the hands of those entrustedwith their welfare by parents who thought that they were doingwhat was best for their children."

  Middlebury College sociology Professor E. Burke RochfordJr. said in his article that the schools -- known as"gurukulas" -- "were staffed by devotees untrained andgenerally ill-prepared to take on the demands of working withchildren." The lack of institutional support for the schools"contributed directly to acts of child abuse by teachers," hesaid.

  As word of abuses spread through the movement, saidRochford, "some efforts were made to intervene. Yet this veryintervention sometimes resulted in new strategies of coerciveabuse. Most significant was enlisting older boys in (one schoolin India) to physically abuse younger students who were deemedtroublesome and unruly by teachers."

  A Washington-based spokesman for the International Societyfor Krishna Consciousness (ISKCON), as the movement is officiallycalled, said the group's decision to publicly confront the abuseissue was made "to re-establish a level of integrity that theorganization has to function on [and] to educate people insidethe movement so that this can never happen again.

  "We didn't react as quickly as we should have, in largepart because we didn't know how to react . . . We're trying nowto be proactive," said Anuttama Dasa, who said his stepson wasamong the physically abused.

  In his article, prepared with the help of studentassistant Jennifer Heinlein, Rochford said ISKCON's philosophicalemphasis on a "renunciate elite" and its denigration of sex andmarriage as symbols of "spiritual weakness" laid the groundworkfor the abuse.

  "Children were abused in part because they were notvalued by leaders, and even, very often, by their own parents whoaccepted theological and other justifications offered by theleadership for remaining uninvolved in the lives of theirchildren," Rochford wrote.

  In the heyday of the Hare Krishna boarding school system,children as young as 3 or 4 were separated from their parents andoften sent thousands of miles away to gurukulas established atmovement ashrams, or spiritual communities, in India, NorthAmerica, Europe, South Africa and Australia. Roughly 2,000 youngpeople passed through the gurukulas, which Rochford said weremore "the functional equivalent of an orphanage" thaneducational institutions.

  Freeing parents of the burden of raising children, notedRochford, allowed the saffron-robed adults to engage fully inproselytizing and selling Hare Krishna books and magazines onstreet corners and at airports -- the movement's hallmark and,until the early 1980s, its predominant source of income.

  Rochford said some of the worst abuses at gurukulas in theUnited States occurred in Dallas -- where the first such schoolin the United States was opened in 1971 but closed by the statein 1976 for a variety of health and safety infractions -- andSeattle.

  In Dallas and Seattle, where the school also has longsince closed, "there were an awful lot of children with fewadults, none of them qualified teachers or even interested inteaching," Rochford said. "The adults least qualified to doother things were put in the schools."

  Perhaps the most widely publicized abuse occurred at NewVrindavana, the showcase ashram near Moundsville, W. Va., wherethe spiritual leader was charged with ordering the murders of twoHare Krishna members after they publicly branded him a pedophile.In a plea-bargain arrangement, the guru, Kirtanananda Swami,later pleaded guilty to mail fraud and racketeering and isserving a 20-year prison term.

  But the worst abuse, according to Rochford, occurred ingurukulas in India, where adolescent boys were "particularlytargeted."

  It is not clear to what degree the movement's founder,A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami, an Indian guru in the Hindu traditionknown to his followers as Prabhupada, was aware of the abuse.

  In an interview, Rochford said Prabhupada, who died in1977, was at the very least aware of reports of excessive"corporal punishment" through letters he received from upsetparents, although there has never been a hint of hisparticipation in the abuse in any way.

  Spokesman Anuttama Dasa said "Prabhupada was aware therewere problems in the schools, but I don't think he had an idea[abuse] was going on. . . . I don't think he conceived at allthere could be sexual abuse in the schools. If he understoodthat, he would have directly intervened."

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