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Friday, Nov 27, 2009
Five years after the last U.S. Hare Krishna boarding school closed, 79 former students are suing, claiming widespread physical and sexual abuse. Their attorney wants to take down the Krishnas gangster-style.
Jul 2, 2001 | How do you compensate an adult who, as a child, felt bones in her hands shatter while she vainly tried to shield herself from a violently abusive teacher?
Seventy-nine former students of Hare Krishna boarding schools, known as gurukulas, are seeking $400 million from the religious sect in compensation for enduring a range of physical, sexual and emotional abuse -- abuse the Krishnas have acknowledged in the past. The plaintiffs' attorney, Texas trial lawyer Windle Turley, filed suit last year in federal court using the civil Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) statute; it is a bold gambit that, if not dismissed, could put the former students in a good position to financially ruin the Hare Krishna movement. Any day they could learn whether the suit will be knocked out of federal court. If that happens, former students will have no choice but to pursue individual abusers and criminally negligent gurukula administrators rather than the entire Krishna establishment.
"I was a three-and-a-half [year-old] girl, mother away in India," reads one anonymous posting on a Web site for former students. "He [a teacher] took me into the boys shower room, stripped off my clothes and beat me until I was unconscious."
The allegations are horrific. Turley describes the Krishna students' suffering as "the most unthinkable abuse and maltreatment of little children which we have seen. It includes rape, sexual abuse, physical torture and emotional terror of children as young as 3 years of age." According to the Turley legal complaint, there were beatings with boards, branches, clubs and poles. In some cases, children were stuffed into trash barrels for two to three days, with the lid on, as punishment for their "sins." In a few schools, children were forced to lick up their vomit from any foul food they may have thrown up.
"It is terrible that child abuse has infected public and private schools, neighborhoods, churches, and families," Anuttama Dasa, director of communications for the International Society for Krishna Consciousness -- ISKCON -- said in a press release last year. "Sadly, many children of the Hare Krishna society have also been victimized. If the events alleged in this suit did occur, we regret that they did, and we will make every effort to help address the needs of the young people named in the suit."
Other Krishna representatives have been more direct. "There is no doubt many children did suffer while under the care of the organisation," the director of ISKCON's Child Protection Office, Dhira Govinda (aka David Wolfe), said in the London Independent last year.
The first U.S. gurukula, or "school of the guru," opened in Dallas in 1971, and eventually there were as many as 11 across the country, including ones in Seattle, Los Angeles, Philadelphia and West Virginia. Several opened abroad, too. Nobody knows how many of the approximately 2,000 gurukula students were abused. As one veteran gurukula teacher put it in a 1990 interview, the abuse was "in enough schools and affected enough children and it went on for enough time."
The U.S. has had a Hare Krishna movement since 1965, when A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada brought it over from India. Theological descendants of Vaishnavism, an ancient Indian strand of Hinduism, the Krishnas attracted thousands of American followers during the height of the counterculture movement in the late '60s. As the followers began to have children, ISKCON established the gurukulas.
E. Burke Rochford Jr., a sociology professor at Middlebury College in Vermont, has studied the Hare Krishna movement since the late '70s, and believes ISKCON's emphasis on celibacy inspired a devaluation of children. (Along with intoxication, meat eating, materialism and gambling, sex for purposes other than procreation was anathema to the Krishna doctrine.) Children were seen as manifestations of carnal weakness and an impediment to parents, who were urged to submit to a grueling life of proselytizing and selling spiritual books.
Devotees who failed at public work were relegated to teaching positions. Individuals with no teaching or child-care experience were entrusted with the care of 15 to 20 small children all day, every day. The circumstances invited physical and emotional abuse. It is also believed -- by former students and by Dasa -- that pedophiles infiltrated the gurukulas, as they do other institutions that afford easy access to children.
