In an authoritarian system, everyone obeys someone else in a chain of command. People near the top have more power over others, while a large segment at the bottom has no power in the system whatsoever. When a few people control everything, abuse is practically inevitable. A high concentration of power means that only the higher-ups get what they want, while everyone else must take what they get.

People may find themselves in a system like this for a variety of reasons. Some people are born into countries or subcultures or groups with closed boundaries and intolerant leaders. Others may choose to join authoritarian groups. Some of these people may feel comfortable in an authoritarian environment, perhaps because they were raised in an authoritarian family and feel isolated and empty on their own or because a temporary experience of extreme stress and self-doubt makes the certitude and structure of an authoritarian environment look appealing. Still others may not recognize or appreciate the implications of an authoritarian environment and may join because of what the group claims to be, not what it is.

Eric Fromm said that people join authoritarian religious groups for a sense of belonging, meaning in life, and direction. He describes the move toward conformity as a longing to "fuse one's self with somebody or something outside of oneself in order to acquire the strength which the individual self is lacking."[1] What Fromm identified as the natural human tendency to conform may be the element that allows authoritarian groups to thrive and make new members.

Although some people join voluntarily, as Fromm suggests, there is a large gray area in what is meant by voluntary. For example, people may join the military voluntarily, but also for financial reasons because they lack the money to attend college. Someone might take a job in an authoritarian corporation for the same reasons, so that survival, not authoritarianism, is the main attraction. In the case of religious groups, people may join because they think it will lead to enlightenment. Later they may realize the group is less enlightening than it originally appeared. People may remain in the group if they feel psychologically or financially dependent. Converts' children may find themselves trapped, simply because their parents are in the group.

Some people get along fine in a coercive authoritarian structure, perhaps because they instinctively know how to navigate the system. Others have a moderately hard time, while still others are seriously hurt.

Usually the weakest link in the system receives the most abuse, and so it was for the children of the International Society for Krishna Consciousness (ISKCON).

Between the years 1970 and 1988, an estimated eight hundred ISKCON children suffered criminal neglect, emotional, physical, or sexual abuse. Most of the abuse took place in the boarding schools system for members' children called gurukula, Sanskrit for "school of the guru." During the 1970s and 1980s, members were required to send their children to gurukula at the age of five (or younger). Children were cloistered in the gurukulas and totally isolated from daily temple life. Parents were only allowed to see their children once or twice a year in most cases.

Emotional, physical, and sexual abuse also took place within "arranged marriages" between girls as young as eleven to men who were twice or three times the girls' ages. A smaller number of children endured abuse at festivals and other social functions at the ISKCON centers, or from parents in family settings.

In April 2004 ISKCON was facing a $400 million lawsuit, Children of ISKCON vs. ISKCON, brought by one hundred former students. (As of the date of publication, this suit was still pending.) In his statement to the press, the attorney for the plaintiffs, Windle Turley, said:

This lawsuit describes 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 three years of age. . . . As a result, a generation of ISKCON children are permanently, and many profoundly, injured.[2]

The purpose of this paper is to examine how the authoritarian culture of ISKCON contributed to child abuse and its cover-up. My analysis is based on my personal experience as a member of ISKCON from 1978 to 1988, and subsequent study of the child abuse problem for ten years (1994 to 2004). In my research I read approximately two hundred pages of survivors' writings about their experiences, and have met and interviewed approximately sixty ISKCON child abuse survivors. In 1995 I befriended three ISKCON child abuse survivors as god children and worked with them (and their families) to help them to find their place in mainstream society. In 1996 one of my Hare Krishna godsons wrote his autobiography for my research and read some of my manuscripts to help me refine my portrayal of the abuse history. I also reviewed the legal documents submitted by all sides in the lawsuit, and have worked as an advocate and media spokesperson for the plaintiffs for the last four years.

ISKCON started out as a relatively benign autocracy with founding guru A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada as the absolute authority on all matters material and spiritual. In 1970, he designated a twelve-member Governing Body Commission (GBC) to help manage the organization.When Prabhupada died in 1977, eleven gurus arose to take his place and head the organization. The gurus took on the roles of oligarchs for the GBC and the whole organization. Beneath the gurus and GBCwas a network of ministers, secretaries, temple presidents, temple commanders, and others appointed or confirmed by the GBC. During the 1970s and 1980s, the entire ISKCON hierarchy was male. As of April 2004, the hierarchy included one woman guru, one woman GBC member, and four female temple presidents.

As in most authoritarian systems, the people on the upper rungs were there because they were willing to do anything to please the people at the top. All full-time ISKCON members worked under an authority figure, who in turn answered to one of the oligarchs. ISKCON members usually lived communally in centers that could be anything from a single family home, to a church surrounded by apartments, to an estate with various buildings and grounds.

All ISKCON centers worked under the auspices of the GBC. If any center rejected GBC authority, then it would have to relinquish the name "ISKCON" and leave the organization.

In ISKCON during the 1970s and 1980s when the bulk of the child abuse took place, the concept of "surrender" was important. It meant that the only way to please Krishna was to move into a temple, forsaking all contact with the "material world" of friends, family, school, career, and any other "material attachments." Preachers looked for naive spiritual seekers who were attracted to the exotic ceremonies and chanting in ISKCON. If a potential convert had a numinous experience while gazing at the Krishna deity in the temple (e.g., while chanting or while meeting or seeing Prabhupada), preachers would help the person interpret the experience as a sign to join ISKCON. People also joined for mundane reasons, such as the need for friendship, housing, and food. The temples provided room and board to practically anyone who agreed to work full time and follow the rules.

Once someone moved into an ISKCON center and felt committed to full surrender, the indoctrination phase began. New people learned the group's ways through formal classes and darshans. Classes took place morning and evening in the temple room; new converts also attended extra classes in their ashrams (dorms). The word darshan means audience, and referred to an audience with the guru, or after the death of Prabhupada, one of the successor gurus.

People who accepted ISKCON doctrine received congratulations and positive reinforcement from peers. People learned to repeat ISKCON slogans and introduce Sanskrit sayings into their speech, voluntarily molding their characters to please the hierarchy. In addition, members learned how to indoctrinate others. Indoctrination, called "preaching," came from all directions in the tightly controlled environment.

Mistrust the outside world. The first lesson ISKCON taught new converts was to mistrust the outside world, which was populated with meat-eating non-devotees they called "karmis," or people caught up in karma. No matter how smart they seemed, people in the material world lived in maya (illusion) because they had not surrendered to ISKCON.

ISKCON's gurus are infallible. The second important lesson was that ISKCON provided shelter from the material world because of the "pure devotees" in the hierarchy. ISKCON portrayed its gurus as infallible, pure, and perfect human beings. In classes new devotees learned to recite the "Ten Offenses to the Holy Name."[3] The first offense was: "To blaspheme the devotees who have dedicated their lives to the propagation of the holy name of the Lord." Since the gurus were dedicated members of the hierarchy, it was an offense to doubt them. Everything they said was true and good. There were terrible consequences for blaspheming pure devotees. They called it the "mad elephant offense," because it was like letting a mad elephant into your garden to stomp all over your devotional creeper. The creeper, in Sanskrit bhakti-lata, was a metaphor for growing love of god.

Open dissent may cause catastrophic consequences. Since the leaders knew what was best for everyone and were always right, all one had to do was follow. Any doubt would make you fall back into material life. ISKCON's glossy magazine was called Back to Godhead, but the implication was that everybody would go back to Godhead except those who rebelled. In classes and darshans speakers gave concrete examples of former members who criticized the leadership and became "snakes" and "demons" in the outside world. The indoctrination made it easy to cover up child abuse. If the leaders said there was nothing going on, that was the end of the discussion.

Simple living saves ISKCON money. The Hindu scriptures say that material life is temporary, but ISKCON interpreted this scripture to mean that members didn't need material things. Devotees usually slept in sleeping bags on the floor, had few belongings, and did not indulge in worldly comforts like vacations, hobbies, or recreation. This dogma saved ISKCON a lot of money and also gave the organization an excuse to neglect the basic needs of children. The misinterpretation of the Hindu philosophy of simple living was twisted into a doctrine that deprived growing children of food, shoes, beds, and toys.

Scriptures twisted to the leaders' advantage. The hierarchy promoted a distorted view of the scriptures that allowed them to shift the blame for all problems onto their followers. For example, they said that according to the scriptures, the gurus had perfect, spiritual bodies. The only way a guru could suffer physical distress was if his disciples committed sin. Therefore, when our gurus got sick, we were supposed to pray for forgiveness for whatever we did to cause it. If a guru had to sleep in and could not get up for the early morning services, it was the disciples' fault.

The gurus told us that according to the scriptures, everything in the world depended on whether Krishna was pleased. If the movement got into trouble with the law, or a bad article came out, they told us to work harder, ask for less in return, and learn to control our material senses. In fact, if anything bad happened anywhere in the world, heavily indoctrinated members felt responsible; something they had done must have failed to please Krishna. With all the followers blaming themselves for everything, the leaders were freed of responsibility for anything.

Informational isolation and control. To isolate members further, ISKCON preached that exposure to outside information in the form of books, movies, television, and so on, would result in material consciousness. Good devotees could only listen to ISKCON music, watch ISKCON movies, and read ISKCON books. Along with keeping devotees' minds "pure," it also kept them uninformed. There was a joke on the fringes at the end of the 1980s that devotees were like potatoes ("they have eyes but they can't see") and mushrooms ("keep 'em in the dark and feed 'em a lot of s--t"). Keeping members in ignorance made it easier to conceal the organization's problems, including child abuse. ISKCON was in the news frequently in the 1970s and 1980s, usually for its eccentricities and crimes. If members could have known what outsiders knew about the organization, they may have decided to take their children and leave.

Information about what was going on inside the hierarchy was also heavily controlled and censored. The publications Back to Godhead and ISKCON World Review (where I worked) had a strict policy of printing only the good news of the organization. In the public relations office, our job was to unite the organization and help members feel proud of ISKCON.

Manufacturing crises to enhance control. If followers cut ties with the outside world, crises will force them to turn to the coercive leadership for protection even more. In the mid-1980s, during the height of child abuse, the leaders announced that a devastating nuclear war was imminent now that Prabhupada had "left the planet." They said the war would bring about the total collapse of society, but after that ISKCON would arise as the one world religion and the ISKCON hierarchy would rule the world. Whether they actually believed this or not, they put the organization into crisis mode. Everyone was frightened and worried about what would happen after the war, rather than the here and now.

Coercive organizations usually have a grandiose mission, such as saving the world. No matter how hypocritical life in the organization gets, the leaders can point to the mission to distract people from the organization's problems. Due to the sense of crisis and urgency in ISKCON, people were willing to overlook everything. The mission of saving the world through Krishna consciousness became all-consuming, for the end was supposedly near. Moreover, in this climate of crisis, the thought of defecting from ISKCON was unthinkable.

Thus, with founding guru Prabhupada gone and the new gurus failing, war fears became another ploy to stop people from "blooping," or falling like a stone into the material ocean.

In a corrupt authoritarian system, there are various abuses. One of the most common is financial abuse, because plutocrats will reward themselves first, and then distribute the leftovers. A system like this often leaves people at the bottom lacking basic necessities. This was the case in ISKCON, where funding the gurukula was at the bottom of the organization's list of priorities. Even though parents often paid high tuition fees, children did not receive proper food, clothing, or medical care.

The following accounts illustrate the poverty level of the gurukulas. The first excerpt is from an interview with former Dallas gurukula teacher Krsna Kumari:

I can remember Bhakta-rupa used to cook the Sunday feast and all we had was USDA stuff plus what we could beg down at the market. . . . I can remember the kids covered in rotten vegetables! Sorting through the rotten bhoga [food] to try to find the good things.[4]

Nirmala Hickey, one of the Children of ISKCON vs. ISKCON plaintiffs, described the situation in these words:

We were hungry all the time. I distinctly remember that, being starving all the time, always wanting food and never getting enough. I believe that's why a lot of us ended up shorter. I was always hungry, and I don't think that was unusual. That we were starving was normal, I would say. That was something I remember myself and other kids saying very often, "I'm starving." Especially if you weren't a teacher's pet. If you were one of their chums, brahmana initiated, or if you were having sex with the higher-ups, you would be okay. You would get all the food you wanted.[5]

Following is Nirmala's description of the stark reality at the boys' school in Vrindavana, India:

One [bathroom] was the teachers'. One was the monitors' and second initiates'. Another bathroom was for boys like me that were maybe a little stronger that could fend for themselves but didn't really have any alliance with monitors or teachers. This group wasn't necessarily being sexually molested for different reasons, usually having to do with [who their parents were].

The fourth bathroom was just for the children that were not in any position to speak or stand up for themselves. The children who were just being totally neglected used that bathroom. That bathroom was always filthy. . . . Their things would be stolen all of the time. When we lost or had our supplies stolen, the punishment was that we would have to wait until the next time they distributed supplies. Subsequently, these boys would always be wearing dirty rags and smelling badly. The only exception was during festival times when people would visit. At those times the teachers would make sure, by whatever means necessary, that everyone looked clean and acted as if everything was okay.[6]

The very nature of an authoritarian structure means that a few people will make all the important decisions for everyone else. A system like this is bound to go out of control if the leaders are ruthless and uncaring. Living under tyranny is humiliating, so the natural tendency for victims is to rebel. If people rebel, they can sometimes overthrow unwanted dictators or find a way to escape. Thus to prevent rebellion, the authoritarian system constantly seeks ways to increase its control. The coercion may be overt (threats, border guards, torture), or subtle (fear, guilt, etc.).

One of the plaintiffs said, "I know that the philosophy behind the school was to break our spirits. This was blatantly spoken to us all the time."[7] In gurukulas, teachers used emotional abuse to discipline the children. For example, children who wet their beds were forced to drink urine or wear their wet underwear on their heads. One teacher made children wear a sign that said, "I am a dog." Teachers punished children by isolating them for hours or days in closets, walk-in refrigerators, or trash bins.

Some gurukula teachers were large, muscle-bound men who never should have been around children. One such teacher allegedly threatened to maim or kill any child who misbehaved. One teacher was said to cup-slap children's ears so hard that they could experience bleeding and loss of hearing. Teachers also pinched children's ears, painfully breaking the cartilage. Teachers regularly beat children. Here is one former student's description:

It was school policy, that every morning after breakfast there was an assembly, and at that assembly one student would be brought in front of the group and "punished" for something he had done the day before. This would show the other children that they should behave well. "Punishment" consisted of [the principal] picking up the boy by the ears, dropping him, and slapping both his ears with his hands as the boy fell. If a boy tried to escape the slaps, a teacher standing next to them, would punch the child with his fist, and the kid would collapse on the floor, screaming. This would "teach" the other children a lesson, to be afraid of the teachers and to behave.[8]

Here is another example of physical abuse as coercion:

Two friends (10 years old) decided to run away. They went off by themselves, with 50 rupees, and were running away from the gurukula. Some people, who recognized the boys to be from Bhaktivedanta Gurukula, informed the gurukula and the principal brought them back. He took the boys from door to door of every ashrama in the gurukula building, and in front of every door, beat these boys to show the other children how bad they were. The witness says the boys were "bleeding from their ears, screaming in pain."[9]

Sexual abuse permeated the gurukula school system during the years in question. Teachers created an atmosphere of sexual harassment by peeping on children in the shower rooms or watching them dress. Here is an excerpt from an ABC TV interview with Ben Bressack, a plaintiff in the lawsuit:

I was pretty much sexually raped every day. My monitor was a teacher that I lived with in the same room with, like, five other students and he used me as his - for his sexual pleasures at any time . . . This was probably the one person that raped me the most, but I had maybe ten or fifteen different men rape me as a child. [10].

Following is an excerpt from Nirmala Hickey, speaking on the same broadcast:

I remember nights sleeping all night with the boy next to me being raped. Yeah, and - and hearing the sounds of it and, you know, wanting to just close my eyes and not, you know - but this was normal.[11]

Victims also suffered spiritual abuse, where authorities used rituals or symbols of the religion as punishment. Raghunatha, a former student, described an incident where one of the teachers beat him using a special ring as brass knuckles. The ring had a lion's head and the teacher called it his "Nrsimadev ring," named for the man-lion incarnation of Krishna.[12]

Teachers and gurus told children that the abuse was their karma because they must have hurt children in a past life and said that to oppose the abuse would only bring more bad karma. Many children who were born and raised with such rhetoric believed that the abuse was their fault.

In 1985, ISKCON leaders started to complain that children were turning into non-devotees.[13] Many former gurukula students left the authoritarian organization with bitter feelings toward the religion. Spiritual abuse may result in a complete loss of faith, or victims may imagine a cruel and violent god that resembles their abusers. Raghunatha once said that he thinks god gets some kind of sick pleasure out of punishing him.

I asked another former student if he ever prayed for help. He said:

Yeah, but you quit that after a while. I prayed like I've never prayed in my life, but not once has God ever answered one single prayer of mine. Every time I pray, it seems to be answered with some bullshit.[14]

The school authorities covered up the abuse and censored children's letters home. The organization purposely tried to make the schools look good in self-promotional publications and movies, including the ISKCON World Review, where I worked. The first issue of the organization's official newspaper carried a flattering article about one of the abusive gurus. On the same page was a picture of a billboard in India that depicted smiling gurukula children on the cover of Life magazine. For the next eight years that I was there, our publication continued to publish articles to protect the secrets of gurukula and quell criticism.

While I was writing for the ISKCON World Review, I knew that it was a public-relations publication meant to counteract bad publicity outside and negative attitudes inside the organization. I knew that there was something wrong with the leadership, but had no idea about the depth of their secrets. I knew that the gurukula authorities were strict with the children, but didn't know they were beating or sexually exploiting them. There was one incident of sexual abuse in the Los Angeles temple nursery school in 1984, but the police arrested the perpetrators and a judge sentenced them to prison. I was not aware of any other child abuse in ISKCON, even though all the classic symptoms were present: a rigid, tightly controlled system with a demand for blind, absolute loyalty; a low level of appropriate touch, and so on. I left ISKCON in 1988, obtained my master's degree in 1992, and found out about the child abuse in 1994. If I had known what was going on when I was a member, I would not have agreed to cover it up. I honestly thought that the gurukula schools were as good as we portrayed them and that any criticism was completely without merit.