In its own official journal, the Hare Krishna movement has published an unusually candid expose detailing widespread physical, emotional and sexual abuse of children who were sent to live in the group's boarding schools in the United States and India in the 1970s and 1980s.
Parents were often unaware of the abuse because they were traveling around soliciting donations for their guru's books, in airports and on the streets, leaving their children in the care of monks and young devotees who had no training in educating children and often resented the task, the report says.The movement's leadership was first forced to confront the victims of abuse at a meeting in May 1996, when a panel of 10 former Krishna pupils testified that they had been regularly beaten and caned at school, denied medical care and sexually molested and raped homosexually at knifepoint.
"I remember being made to sleep naked in a cold bathtub for a month," said Jahnavi Dasi, 26, who was sent to a Krishna boarding school in Los Angeles at age 4, in an interview Thursday. "I had wet my bed, and it was easier for them to make me sleep in the tub than to change my sheets."
Dasi told the leadership meeting in 1996 that she entered a diabetic coma for three weeks after her teachers insisted that her health problems were a ruse to avoid cleaning the school and chanting in the temple.
"They neglected to take me to a doctor, so I ended up in a coma," at which time she was taken to a hospital, she said.
The Hare Krishna movement, a Hindu sect brought to the United States by the Indian guru A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami in the 1960s, is now acknowledging that the legacy of abuse and the leadership's failure to grapple with it earlier have led many Hare Krishna children and their parents in the United States to abandon the faith.
The movement now claims an estimated 90,000 followers in the United States, of whom only about 800 live full time in the group's 45 American spiritual communities, called ashrams. At the movement's peak in the United States in the late 1970s, about 10,000 devotees lived in American ashrams, but most now live and work in the secular world.