Child Abuse in the Hare Krishna Movement:1971-1986

E. Burke Rochford, Jr. with Jennifer Heinlein

[continued]

The larger consequence of these ideas was the virtual exclusion of parents from the gurukula. Parental involvement with their children was largely unwelcome. Moreover, when children did return to their parents' home community for school vacations, these visits very often afforded limited opportunities for parent and child to spend time together. As one mother and teacher explained.

You have to remember that parents didn't have houses. They didn't have their own place. We never had a house . . . So when you say a kid went home, that's a euphemism. He went to the temple. His mother had service that she was doing all along. His father had service that he was doing all along. And now all of a sudden this kid is there. So now what does he do? He hangs around the temple. He gets stepped on by people as they are coming up the stairs [into the temple] . . . And he wants his mother's attention when she is cooking for the deities. The fact is no one took care of the kids . . . The kid did whatever he did. And the parents just kept on doing whatever it was they were doing. (Interview 1997)

A second generation devotee recounts her vacations from school and the burden these visits placed on her and other family members.

When I got older, I started to spend my vacations with my Mata. But vacation time for me was not vacation time for her. For Kapila [her brother] and I, she would get a motel room every night but her service to the temple still came first. Only after she had chanted all of her rounds without interruption and she had collected at least three hundred dollars did Kapila and I get to do anything. We usually would sit for six hours in the cold van parked outside a shopping mall and wait for her. Finally she would finish, and even though her back was aching and her shoulders were heavy from carrying a ninety pound bag of books all day, she somehow would find the energy to sneak us into a nearby pool and then take us to ice cream. But most of the time we didn't see how tired she really was and so, whining and complaining about how little attention we got, we sometimes drove her to tears. (Devi Dasi, K. 1990:12)

The gurukulas in India undertook what can only be described as extreme efforts to further isolate children from their parents. In the Vrindavan gurukula it appears that the administration of the school monitored, and sometimes censured, letters written by students to their parents. When a student attempted to write his parents about the negligent and abusive conditions found at the school, he was reprimanded and told to re-write his letter.

X: I used to write letters to my mom, during the rough times, saying, ‘Get me out of here.’ And he [school administrator] read them and would tear'em up and make me write new ones. XX: He did that to me too. (Group Interview, 1993)

In other cases, students in the Vrindavan gurukula avoided writing to their parents about the conditions found at the school because they assumed their letters would be read by the administration, or, as in the case below, they feared their parents would reject allegations of abuse. As one mother explained.

My son complains bitterly about what went on in Vrindavan. Of course I have asked him a million times why he didn't tell me what was going on. Because I used to go and visit him every year. And he wouldn't say anything to me. He would just give me his shopping list. When I asked him in retrospect why didn't you tell me he just said, ‘Because you wouldn't believe me.’ . . . He assumed I wouldn't believe him. And he assumed his letters would be censured. And so he never wrote anything that would cause him to be censured. (Interview 1997)²⁷

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