Other New religious movements Guru-led movement or ashram United States (bankruptcy court, Texas) and India · 2005

ISKCON gurukula abuse: $9.5 million court-supervised settlement for former boarding students

Record class

Institutional event

Evidence status

Civil finding

Authority role

gurukula teachers and administrators, the movement's institutional leadership

Organization

International Society for Krishna Consciousness (ISKCON)

Spiritual nexus

Devotee parents enrolled their children in gurukulas, where the children were separated from their families and placed under the total custodial and spiritual authority of the movement's teachers and administrators — the arrangement that made the abuse unrefusable.

Guru or spiritual-teacher authority
Institutional obedience or isolation

Evidence structure

Proceedings

2005-05-26 · court-supervised class settlement with claims-validation mechanism

United States Bankruptcy Court (Chapter 11 reorganisation), Texas. A bankruptcy-court-supervised settlement of approximately $9.5 million was finalised for roughly 450 former gurukula students who reported sexual, physical and emotional abuse in ISKCON's residential schools in the United States and India during the 1970s and 1980s.

Documented coercion mechanisms

children separated from parents into residential religious schools
total custodial and spiritual authority of teachers

Primary record

Sources

academic archival record civil settlement 'ISKCON Abuse Cases Settled for USD 9.5 Million', The Pluralism Project, Harvard University.: Records the approximately $9.5 million settlement, the number of claimants, and the gurukula residential-school context.

Related record

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