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3. Child Abuse
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Child Abuse All these boys must be taken care of very nicely. They are the future hope. —Prabhupada letter, July 1974 These kids were growing up and seriously leaving [iskcon]. Not a little bit leaving. Not leaving and being favorable, still chanting and living outside. Nothing like that. They were leaving. And suddenly it was like “What happened?” And then it started to be revealed that the kids were molested. —Longtime iskcon teacher, interview 1990 Religion and child abuse, “‘perfect together’ . . . and mutually attractive,” so concluded Donald Capps in his 1992 presidential address to members of the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion. Mutually attractive even though religion has often vigorously defended the rights of children, including condemning child abuse and neglect (Capps 1992; Costin, Karger, and Stoesz 1996:47). Yet research on child abuse suggests that religious beliefs can foster, encourage, and justify the abuse of children (Capps 1992; Ellison and Sherkat 1993; Greven 1990; Jenkins 1996). Moreover, church structures may provide opportunities for clergy to abuse (Krebs 1998; Shupe 1995). Tragically, some of iskcon’s children were physically, psychologically , and sexually abused by people responsible for their care and wellbeing in the movement’s ashram-based gurukulas from 1971 until the mid-1980s. I develop a sociologically informed framework to understand how and why this child abuse and neglect took place, based on a variety of organizational factors that fostered, and indeed created, opportunities for child abuse in iskcon’s schools. 3 74 Child Abuse in ISKCON’s Schools iskcon’s first formal gurukula was established in Dallas in 1971 and remained the only school of its type in the movement until 1976, when state authorities forced it to close. At the time of its closing, the school had approximately one hundred students, the majority of whom were between the ages of four and eight. In 1975, with the impending demise of the Dallas school, gurukulas opened in Los Angeles and at New Vrindaban , and between 1975 and 1978, eleven iskcon schools opened in North America. In 1976, the Bhaktivedanta Swami International Gurukula began accepting adolescent boys as students in Vrndavana, India.1 As iskcon became a global movement in the late 1970s and early 1980s, gurukulas were also started in France, Australia, South Africa, England, and Sweden, and in 1980 and 1981, regional schools opened in Lake Huntington, New York, and central California (Bhaktivedanta Village), respectively (Dasa, Manu 1998). Reports by second-generation youths, parents, and educators alike suggest that some of the children who attended the gurukula suffered physical, psychological, and sexual abuse. But it is not clear just how many children were directly abused or saw their friends and classmates being abused. Lacking reliable quantitative findings, it therefore is extremely difficult to determine precisely the exact incidence of child abuse in iskcon’s gurukulas. Over the years several estimates have been offered, ranging from 20 percent of all students who attended an ashram-gurukula suffering some form of abuse to as many as 75 percent of the boys enrolled at the Vrndavana, India, gurukula being sexually molested during the late 1970s and early 1980s. The only quantitative study of the prevalence of child abuse in the gurukulas was a 1998 survey conducted by iskcon’s youth ministry. This nonrandom survey of 115 former gurukula students aged fifteen to thirty-four found that 25 percent had been sexually abused for more than one year; 29 percent reported that they experienced sexual abuse for a period of between one month and one year. With respect to physical abuse, 31 percent indicated that they had been repeatedly hit by a teacher or someone two or more years older, to the point of leaving marks on their body (Wolf 2004:322).2 As of January 2002, iskcon’s Association for the Protection of Vaishnava Children (apvc), which was formed in response to the growing awareness of child abuse claims, had received allegations of child Child Abuse | 75 [34.201.37.128] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 01:16 GMT) mistreatment—including child abuse—against more than three hundred people. The alleged perpetrators often had several victims, and each victim suffered multiple incidents of abuse. Sixty percent of the abuse reports made to the apvc were from before 1992, when “there were clusters of allegations connected with an iskcon school [gurukulas]” (Wolf 2004:323). Moreover, more than 80 percent of these cases were accusations of sexual abuse (Wolf 2004:323). Whatever the actual incidence of child abuse...