Sexual abuse in the sannyas world

This page is under construction

Rumours of sexual abuse of children by adult sannyasins have swirled about for many years but a real airing of the subject has not happened. Thus, the extent of it has not been investigated, nor the damage acknowledged or addressed. In Sep 2021, some survivors of this abuse began telling their stories in semi-private Facebook groups.

Wiki editors managed to get access to some of the stories and discussions posted in Fb but were unable to get those involved to share directly with us and so, since the groups are not really accessible by everyone and permission to use the material would have been dodgy, we decided to wait until more public sources became available.

the Times article

The first more public source arrived a year later in Sep 2022, when the Times of London put together a major article on the subject. While the over-riding tone of the article is anti-cult, ie condemning every aspect of Osho and his people, it will still be useful to refer to this article, to at least get the ball rolling on this long-overdue reckoning ....

In the Times article, four girls, now women, tell their stories. All four describe conditions in general in sannyasin communes as very lax and permissive regarding anything to do with sex, and thereby conducive to abuse. Students and staff in the two British schools were said to have showered together, and so on. The Times claims sexual abuse of children in all these sannyasin commune situations was "rife".

The testimony of two of the women goes into their personal experience, at times involving particular men, two of whom are named, and one who is only described, though he was named in the Facebook group. The two who WERE named offered apologies, acknowledging their own inappropriate actions, the harm they caused and their regrets. They were Sw Anand Milarepa and Sw Deva Mutribo. It must be said that their apologies have been deemed inadequate by some in the former kid community, details of this still to be sorted out.

Besides pointing to particular men, these two women also explore their personal suffering and some of the circumstances of the sannyas milieu which they felt contributed to the climate of abuse. Sarito Carroll was ten years old the first time she was abused. The Times article says that she "believes that the wider community is still in denial", saying that "Each individual was responsible for their behaviour, but the culture certainly made it permissible". She is now writing a book about it all. Other survivors are said to be creating a documentary directed by Maroesja Perizonius, herself a "sannyas kid", who also made an earlier film about her own life as a child with Osho, see below.

Some of the most shocking testimony is given by Rosalind Keefe, who was fourteen at the time of her abuse at the hands of "a respected leader at the ashram". She says that he asked her whether she had started menstruating yet. This might appear to be the question of a man concerned whether she might be "too young" for him, but -- alas! -- the question is the hinge for a more contemptible decision, in exactly the opposite direction. When she replies that she hasn't started her menses, he is happy that he can go ahead and not get her pregnant. She is young ENOUGH.

Keefe's words also appear in the last paragraph of the article:

Keefe says it has taken her years to recognise what happened to her as rape. “You have to understand the impact of all the psychological coercion,” she says. Bhagwan taught his disciples to act on impulse and the children internalised that. It was an atmosphere where people were constantly violating physical boundaries, she says. If she didn’t enjoy what was being done to her, Keefe says, “I assumed that was just my problem.”

There is much to consider in this. "Bhagwan taught his disciples to act on impulse" is the Times' assertion, ostensibly if not explicitly attributed to Keefe. As a distillation of Osho's teaching it has little merit, though many sannyasins may have believed something like that. Thus, the sannyas culture needs also to be considered. It is possible for example that such beliefs could have pushed some men harboring predatory impulses over the edge into acting on them.

As in the larger societies sannyasins come from, the ability of children to protect themselves from predators is limited, by social norms and status and a kid's less developed autonomy, emotional maturity and just plain size. As well, there may have been circumstances unique to sannyas that contributed to their vulnerability. What protections actually found in mainstream cultures may have been disabled? Etc etc.

We in the Wiki want to explore this phenomenon in some depth, as many sannyasins who have participated in communal life where kids were around may have been at least passively complicit in what does appear to have been widespread abuse. This is the downside of the rare freedom sannyasins were given by Osho to explore life beyond social strictures. So let's explore. Readers are invited to send relevant material to the editors. And please be patient.

other media

A number of books have already been published from (former) sannyas kids that either mention this pattern of abuse or go deeply into it. Here are some:

My Life in Orange, subtitled "Growing Up with the Guru", by Tim Guest, first published in 2005, one of the earliest of the books from former sannyas kids. It was republished in 2018, after Wild Wild Country came out.

Insektenglück, by Leela Goldmund, available in German only, published in 2020

Insektenpech, also by Leela Goldmund, available in German only, published in 2021

Sins of My Father, subtitled "A Daughter, a Cult, a Wild Unravelling", by Lily Dunn, published in 2022

De droom van mijn moeder, ("the dream of my mother"), subtitled "Leven in de Bhagwan commune" ("life in the Bhagwan commune") by Maroesja Perizonius, published in 2006, in Dutch, translated into German as

Der Traum meiner Mutter, published in 2008, subtitled "Meine Kindheit in einer Bhagwan-Kommune" ("my childhood in a Bhagwan-commune")

more will be coming .... And these books were preceded by a film on an apparently similar theme, Communekind ("child of the commune"), released in 2004 by Maroesja Perizonius. It too was in Dutch but with French and English subtitles to make it more accessible. It won two Dutch film awards and was shown in a number of film festivals.

background

Osho was called "the sex guru" by many outsiders, for his unusual approach to sexual matters. Without getting too elaborate, we might say that Osho's path of transcendence does not involve denial, renunciation or repression, the stock-in-trade of organized religions. These traditional practices have in fact created most of the sexual perversions and obsessions which pervade all our societies. So Osho teaches acceptance of everything that comes: enjoy it AND go beyond it by passing through it with awareness and love, as much as possible.

For many sannyasins and friends, this open-hearted "Yes!" has been an eye-opener and a life-changing benediction. But it has also led to some problems, however, which have not been much acknowledged up to now. In this atmosphere, and in the name of freedom and trust, many sannyasin kids were relatively unsupervised, some to the point of neglect. So some pedophiles and predatory men wandered in and found a paradise. And possibly some whose intentions were not necessarily knowingly in those directions when they came grew to be that way. The relatively free and open exploration of sex in sannyas attracted a few opportunists, some possibly even believing they were there to raise their consciousness.

And even with the best intentions, everyone brought their sexual baggage, wounds and conditioning to this experiment, so it was messy, for everyone, but those who stayed with Osho were and are glad for the clearing-out of that baggage. Those who didn't stay left for many reasons, often unrelated to sexual matters, but it must be acknowledged that abused former sannyas kids are among the most disenchanted, and many other sannyas kids who were not abused themselves had close friends who were and became similarly disenchanted. A whole generation of potential carriers of Osho's legacy -- those who SHOULD have been among the most enthusiastic carriers, having been brought up in "ideal" circumstances -- are among the most alienated.

The former sannyas kids have waited a long time to tell their stories publicly, beyond whispering to a few friends. Now the stories are out there, in the Times article, in books, and potentially many more areas, firing up the public imagination and being used by guardians of the status quo to invalidate Osho's vision and legacy. Thus, the exploration, airing and processing of this dark side of sannyas is essential if Osho's legacy is to continue.

explorations

Given the atmosphere of sexual exploration in Osho's communes, a broad range of behaviour inevitably occurred, and when it included children, depending on the physical and emotional maturity of the child and the aggressiveness of the adult, it could well be thought of and experienced as abusive. In this regard it is likely useful to note that no complaints of adult victimization of young boys are known as yet, so this page for now will concern itself with young girls and women. Below we have created a few thematic areas to organize ideas, though they unavoidably overlap and flow into each other ....

the child

In many countries, it is customary to specify particular ages as marking boundaries and levels of appropriate / inappropriate sexual behaviour, commonly called the "age of consent". Humans are much too variable to fit comfortably into these categories, but this is mainly how the law works, if at all. For us in the wiki, there is only one well-defined boundary that seems worthwhile, not a number of years lived but puberty. There are various outward signs of readiness for sexual activity, which reflect a flow of hormones, and first menstruation is precise and useful in this regard. After that event, other considerations also apply, but before it, any sexual activity with a significantly older male must be regarded as premature and inappropriate, something for any responsible male to avoid and self-examine regarding impulses in that direction.

With kids the same age, sexual play is natural, even before puberty, but where to draw the line between "same age" and "significantly older"? And the children's innocent play may become confused by parents' expectations and judgments. How much parents should be "guiding" their kids regarding all this is another tricky question, how to find the "sensible middle path" between too much guidance (conditioning, control) and not enough (neglect, below). Osho's sannyasins tended to explore (and err) on the side of not enough. Some of this was worthwhile and some of it damaging.

After puberty, we can say that a girl might be physically, hormonally ready, but that does not mean that she is emotionally ready. This is no trivial matter. We might consider a hypothetical spectrum of emotional maturity from puberty to age 25. Any age thresholds will be arbitrary, like the various notions of adulthood, commencing at 16, 18, 19 or 21. These age boundaries might have some merit as maturity lines to be drawn, but they are vague, approximate lines, only having merit if their vagueness is well understood, in the sense that every individual is different.

How well is a young girl prepared for the emotional entanglements that inevitably come with the simple physical act? One woman writing in a group on Facebook exploring these issues acknowledged that her parents had explained the mechanics of sex very early, but she was woefully unprepared to deal with what she called relationships, eg expectations of closeness, caring, etc. A common thread in the group discussions was feeling used, their youth, inexperience and relative innocence mere commodities, their individuality and self-worth unimportant.

The resilient and/or emotionally mature may be able to bounce back from abuse, learn from it and move on. But not all were so well prepared or endowed. Some were also neglected, and had less support. Thus, the first sexual experiences of some less fortunate kids were violations that they have not recovered from forty years later. And "violation" is the right word for many of the sexual incidents between an adult male and an early-to-sub-teenage girl, unsure of what she wants and who she might want it with. Even if there was apparent consent, and even if there was no threat or violence involved.

One cannot easily shrug off such violations, as in "Just get over it". Osho has equated sexual energy with life energy enough that it should not be difficult to imagine that a violation in this area on one's first experiences might be deeply injurious, especially when accompanied by a smorgasbord of secrecy, humiliation, threats, cajoling, invalidation, half-truths and blame. Post-traumatic stress disorder, PTSD, is a condition first described in connection with military veterans who could not "get over" horrors they had experienced or witnessed. "Shell-shock". That it is not different from what some abuse survivors have to contend with is now widely recognised by psychiatrists and other psychic health professionals.

prevalence

As yet, we do not know how widespread or damaging child sexual abuse in sannyas has been. That is still to be explored and brought to light, but rumour plus the semi-public sharings on Facebook suggest incidents were far from isolated, with some very damaging outcomes including suicide attempts, drug addictions and other long-term mental health issues.

In the Times article all four of the women speak broadly of widespread incidents, while two of them are very specific about "authorities" knowing it was happening. Caroll says that after several instances of abuse at the Ranch, she was sent to a clinic to be fitted with a diaphragm, meeting two other girls her age in the same situation. Keefe mentions going to the main office to see about working in the ashram, to be met with "Do you fuck?", supplemented with a list of men who had had vasectomies.

One might argue that Keefe may have misconstrued the possibility of a joke and that Carroll's experience in the Ranch clinic reflected nothing more than taking care the girls didn't get pregnant but both arguments would be in our opinion grossly brushing aside the girls' emotional needs and their need for help rather than the opposite. Such rationalizations would be mental exercises in the service of denial, not affirmations of the strengths of the sannyas community.

It may be interesting to note that some mainstream societies, at least in the West, have been ahead -- perhaps far ahead -- of the sannyas world in recognising the extent of the problems and have started to address them. Some studies have found a startling prevalence of abuse in their societies.

The Badgley Report of 1984 was the first national systematic effort in Canada -- perhaps in the world(?) -- to explore what it called "sexual offenses against children". It was thorough and dense, and as such, perhaps not so accessible, but it found a lot of abuse: Major findings of the report included that 1/2 of females and 1/3 of males have at some time in their lives been the victim of unwanted sexual acts, with 4/5 of these acts having taken place during childhood or adolescence.

More accessible may be a survey published in Alberta Canada just in 2020. This survey was commissioned by the Association of Alberta Sexual Assault Services, an umbrella organization of groups dealing with issues of sexual abuse and assault. It found 44% of female and 24% of male adults in the province reported they had been the victims of some sort of sexual abuse while they were children, results in the same order of magnitude as those of Badgley.

That's a lot, and on that basis we might expect to find a lot among sannyasins as well. At best, we might hope that it is/was rather less, for reasons that will be explored below ...

neglect

Sannyas kids had much more freedom than almost any similar age cohort in the world, and that certainly had its upside. But basic levels of guidance and mentoring were often lacking, to the point of an unhealthy neglect. Osho's frequent condemnation of the nuclear family model -- which of course does have its problems -- and promotion of the commune model led to a lot of collective assumptions about how his commune/buddhafield would operate differently from normal societies and therefore not produce the same pathologies. These assumptions included:

assumption	what really happened
a) Osho would take care that no harm would come to us	Many DID feel protected from harm and have "miraculous" stories to back up that notion, but Osho did not promise any such thing and told us repeatedly that he was a very dangerous man
b) in the commune, a child would have not just one mother and father but hundreds, and could go to any of them for help or nurturing	Possibly the most misleading and least examined of these assumptions ... parents were there to grow and were happy to have a thousand baby-sitters, but few of those thousand baby-sitters actually picked up the slack, and few specific alt-parenting arrangements were actually made. See also schools below.
c) our spiritual journey and choice of Osho as our Master was a supreme commonality that would transcend all issues	This last one sort of includes all the above but it has one very specific aspect which has not been examined: Most former sannyas kids did not come to Osho by choice but were brought to him by their seeker-parents. In that respect their position was like that of kids born into any other religion. They took sannyas to blend in but some now reject Osho as much as the most fervent ex-Catholics reject their parents' religion.

schools

Schools are the most significant alt-parenting arrangements made in any civilized society. Their stated purpose is something loftier of course, but child-care is one of their prime functions, as we learned when so many schools were closed during the covid pandemic. And pedophiles go where the kids are, especially residential schools, where kids are separated from their parents for lengthy periods. In sannyas, four main schools came into being, functioned for a while and disappeared. They had different styles and served different child-care and educational needs in different eras.

"Hemhira" in Pune One was a day-care-type school taking care of kids from about five to ten years of age. It was about education in part, if the kids wanted that, and play, lots of it, with direction coming from the kids themselves as much as anyone. It seemed fairly idyllic from the outside, but there were already sinister currents.

One name came up again and again in the Fb discussions, and the wiki will probably not violate any sacred principles by naming him here, as he has long since disappeared, leaving only his sannyas name behind as a signature on water. This was Sw Sharna, already active, sometimes aggressively and nastily so, with girls as young as nine in Hemhira. One of the posters in Fb recalls her horror when seeing him again in Medina, one of the sannyas schools in England.

There were two sannyas schools operating during the Ranch era. One was for Ranch kids of a wider age range, say five to fifteen. It was a day school (?), where kids went back to their parents or some kind of work after classes. The school itself was in Antelope, outside the Ranch property. Antelope shortly got "taken over" by an influx of sannyasin residents, who soon outnumbered the original inhabitants and changed its name to "City of Rajneesh", giving sannyasins an incontestable legal base from which to run municipal-type operations.

The other Ranch-era school was Medina, about 100 km NE of London, not far from Cambridge, run by Poonam. Medina was more than a school. It was one of the biggest sannyasin centers in Europe, providing work and communal living for hundreds of sannyasins. As a school, it attracted kids from all over Europe, since English was the international language of sannyas and in fact the world.

And it was a residential school. Parents were not usually in a position to go there but wanted a safe place for their kids to get educated and live a good sannyas-style life. Kids as young as ten years old report traveling alone to get there and not knowing anyone, so they were particularly vulnerable.

The schools in Antelope and Medina collapsed when Osho left the Ranch, and the World Tour era kept sannyasins from organizing and settling anywhere on any large scale. Still, at some point during the Tour, "Ko Hsuan" came into being in Chulmleigh, a market town in Devon, in SW England. Ko Hsuan was another residential school. Perhaps these happen more easily in England because of their long private school tradition.

All the schools except Hemhira were "official" schools, in that they were registered according to the laws of the land and offered some kind of "standard" educational curriculum in addition to sannyasin programs. In those days, information about sexual abuse of children was not widely available; conventional notions about it revolved around cliches like a guy in a trenchcoat hustling little girls outside schools. Few knew that it happened in homes, in churches, in boy scout troops, in residential schools. Parents and leaders with access to children were trusted figures in any community.

That is, no one knew except the kids, and they were encouraged to keep quiet about it, by the abusers especially and by those with an investment in the "system", whatever system one happened to be in. In abusive situations in homes, such encouragement was often strongly coercive, to the point where memories af abuse could be completely submerged and repressed. And moral judgments might be projected back onto the child. It's all her fault, she's so bad, etc. A child with such a burden will not readily insist on the truth or may not even remember it.

the commune

In the West, abuse is endemic, both in nuclear families, and in other situations, where (step-)fathers, older brothers and care-takers are by far the most common perpetrators. It is easy to see that in this situation a power relationship is already established and is easily maintained, along with an omerta-like secrecy. And even with abuse occurring outside the family, an anti-sexual morality coupled with male-dominant "values" -- both derived from the organized religions that still hold considerable sway -- ensure that secrecy prevails in many abusive situations. In this way is the child isolated and disempowered. We might suspect that this holds not just in the Christian West but wherever there are significant moral judgments about sex and where women's status is significantly lower than men's. In other words, just about everywhere.

With the nuclear family setup somewhat sidelined in sannyasin communes and women in charge of almost everything, the dynamics that might lead to sexual abuse were different, though we have heard that there was some old-fashioned nuclear-style abuse too. And there were other elements that one might think would rather reduce such incidents. One, that our greater freedom of sexual expression might channel the biological imperative of sex in healthier ways.Two, that our practice of self-examination, however flawed, might reduce the tendency to fixate on "the other", either as a source of happiness or misery, leading to less blame, less expectation and less sense of entitlement. Three, that our practices of honest communication, also however flawed, might reduce the damaging effects of secrecy. And four, that the explicit and constant reminder of love in Osho's work might reduce tendencies to "use" another person.

But the flaws in this "system" seem to have been too much for it to function "ideally". Freedom of sexual expression expanded beyond simple sex between consenting adults to include what we might call "semi-consenting" minors, as described by Keefe in the Times article. And even some plainly non-consenting sub-teens, according to rumour. To some extent, non-self-examining men were bound to come and join the party and assert their "rights" to certain kinds of freedom, even at the expense of their victims' rights. The wiki will be considering:

a) Were there more of these kinds of men in sannyas than in other subgroups of "normal" societies? the same? less? / Were there aspects of sannyas that allowed them to flourish more than they might have in "normal" societies?

b) What about this grey area of "semi-consenting" minors? While there were plenty of young girls who felt and understood the need to explore this important aspect of life, and were able to choose their partners and the context of their early sexual encounters, it is clear that for many girls, these ideal conditions did not apply.

This last area of inquiry is potentially vast. We will try to include experience and position statements from victims/survivors as well as from those who believe that Osho's sannyas did not do too badly compared to "normal". We will NOT adopt sociological, argumentative nor preachy approaches but rather just hear, listen, consider and absorb. NOR will we insist on coming to a conclusion. In this approach we believe some healing may be found.

the abuser

We will not speculate much about the qualities possibly inherent in the abusers at this point, but one feature of the predator/prey relationship may be worthy of comment: the dynamic of power. In men with power issues, younger women may be more attractive because they are less "worldly-wise", or, in the case of adult males with sub-adult females, just smaller and/or more deferential to the supposedly wiser and just plain bigger adult. These men may be more likely to be serial abusers, not just in one or two cases. And kids are innocent and, for some men, attractive for that reason alone. Here is someone that can easily be dominated. We'll leave it at that for now but this is a rich area with lots of potential to explore. And we are open to suggestions.

In fact, the abusers, named and unnamed, in the sannyas community might yet perform some valuable service to the community, the victims and even humanity as a whole, if they were to use their presumed by now long experience in meditation to go inside and explore this issue and what was it in them that drove them to this, especially the serial abusers. WHY WERE THEY ATTRACTED again and again to powerless subteens who didn't really want this when easy and blame-free sex was available all around them? Etc etc.

legal matters

There are two main reasons we will not be featuring many details of particular abuse events here in the wiki, the who, what, when and where. One is that we don't know anything directly ourselves and publishing someone else's complaint would simply land us in libel and slander issues, where the alleged abuser might have every reason to complain. The other is that a detailed airing of these matters might lead to some serious legal issues for the alleged abuser and/or his associates.

We do not believe that a pursuit of punishment can be readily compatible with other goals such as healing, transparency, insight, etc, so we'll be discreet about details. These issues perhaps explain somewhat why most of the alleged abusers who have at least partially acknowledged and apologised have been somewhat half-hearted -- as seen at least by some of the survivors -- and why more alleged abusers have not acknowledged or apologised for anything. Such is the adverse effect that the Justice System may have on healing.

more to come ...