Child Abuse in the Hare Krishna Movement:1971-1986

E. Burke Rochford, Jr. with Jennifer Heinlein

[continued]

Despite the ongoing denigration of marriage and family life and the corresponding loss of status accorded householders, most devotees ultimately married. By 1980, there appears to have been about an equal number of married and unmarried devotees residing within ISKCON's North American communities. About one-quarter had children (Rochford 1997). Conversely, a survey in 1991 92 (N=268) revealed that a sizeable majority of ISKCON's North American membership were married, or previously married. Only 15% had never been married. Family life also expanded with a substantial majority (70%) of those surveyed in 1991 92 having one or more children.19 By the onset of the 1990s, ISKCON had become a householder's movement in North America (Rochford 1997), and increasingly world-wide (Rochford 1995b).

Even with the rapid expansion of marriage and family life, anti-householder attitudes changed little organisationally.20 Householder life remained a ‘dark-well’ spiritually. Many parents who accepted the leadership's ideas about marriage and family sought to counteract their lowly status by placing their commitment to ISKCON and Krishna Consciousness above their family obligations. This presented a burden of considerable proportions for both parents and their children. One second generation woman suggests just how difficult this proved to be for her own mother.

But sometimes I would look at her and I could see her being torn apart inside. I could see how she yearned to be a mother once again; sewing by the fire, cooking our dinners, and helping us with our hard days at school, and at the same time trying her hardest to please the Guru and the community by showing her detachment to her family. (My emphasis; Devi Dasi, K. 1990:14)

As householder life became disparaged, children too were defined and redefined in ways that undermined their status, and ultimately the care they received within the gurukula. Up until the early 1980s, children born within ISKCON were commonly portrayed as being spiritually pure. After all, it was believed that their souls had progressed spiritually to the point where they had gained the good fortune of taking birth in a devotee family. Yet this view changed by the mid-1980s as some leaders complained that ISKCON's children were turning out to be little more than ‘karmies’ (that is, non-religious outsiders), and, therefore, gurukula had failed in its mission to produce spiritually advanced children. Both of these frameworks, I want to argue, became justifications used by the leadership to dismiss the gurukula, the children, and their responsibility toward both.21

As two long-time ISKCON teachers recount.

They [leadership] put a lot of energy into making new devotees from outside the community. But you didn't have to put any energy into making children into devotees, or so they thought . . . And I think there was a lot of misconception about how Prabhupada thought the children [were] conceived. They thought that if the children were conceived properly then it was a cinch. And that makes no sense at all. I compare it to going through a store and buying good seeds and then you don't plant them, you don't water them, you just throw them around . . . So many things that we assumed, that we never sat down and analysed. We just took it for granted; That the children were born into the movement, and particularly if they were conceived properly of chanting five hours of Hare Krishna. Does that make sense? It never made sense to me. I always assumed that we would train the children, that we could never take their Krishna Consciousness, or their character, or anything for granted. (Interview 1990)

And everyone just thought that you send them away to the gurukula and when they came back they were going to be like Pralad Maharaja [a spiritually-realised devotee of Krishna]. They were going to be chanting japa. They were going to be shaved-up. They were going to be distributing books. They were going to be nice little chaste wives, rolling chapatis. (Interview 1997)

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