Documentary record Bound by Fear
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Conviction Buddhist institutions and contexts Buddhist institutions and lineages Stickney Township, Illinois, USA · 2013

Camnong Boa-Ubol: Thai Buddhist monk's guilty plea and 15-year sentence for assaulting a girl at Wat Dhammaram

Record class

Core record

Evidence status

Convicted

Authority role

monk resident at Wat Dhammaram Temple

Organization

Wat Dhammaram Temple, Stickney Township, Illinois

Spiritual nexus

Boa-Ubol used his standing as a temple-resident monk to draw a child into private, paid work on temple grounds, then into an isolated trailer on the property, exploiting both his monastic authority and control over access to the temple space.

  • Pastoral or clerical authority
  • Institutional obedience or isolation

Evidence structure

Proceedings

  1. 2013-09-30 · guilty plea and sentence

    Circuit Court of Cook County, Illinois. Camnong Boa-Ubol, a monk who lived and worked at Wat Dhammaram Temple, pleaded guilty to one count of aggravated criminal sexual assault and was sentenced to 15 years in prison. The assaults began in 1998, when the victim was 13 and he offered her paid work on the temple grounds, and continued for about two years; she became pregnant and gave birth as a result. He fled to another temple in Long Beach, California, before being arrested in Anchorage, Alaska, in 2012, roughly 13 years after the offenses began.

Documented coercion mechanisms

  • monastic authority and control over temple-grounds employment, used to draw a 13-year-old into private contact for paid temple chores

Primary record

Sources

reliable contemporaneous court reporting plea and sentencing report 'Buddhist Monk Sentenced To 15 Years For Sexual Assault', CBS Chicago (2013).

Reports the guilty plea, 15-year sentence, the temple setting, the victim's age at onset, and the resulting pregnancy and birth.

reliable contemporaneous press arrest report 'Camnong Boa-Ubol, Former Buddhist Monk, Charged With Raping 15-Year-Old Girl', HuffPost (2012).

Reports the arrest and initial charges, and the flight to a second temple in Long Beach, California before capture in Alaska.

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