ABSTRACT
The chapter explores Hindu Devadasis: the girls and women who serve (primarily) the Goddess in parts of past and present-day India. It examines excerpts from Hindu scriptures, historical developments of Devadasi customs, and their scope for sexual exploitation of vulnerable, impoverished girls and women, and concludes that the Devadasi institution is a distinctly Hindu form of spiritual abuse with dimensions of sexual, gender-based, and economic/financial abuse. There is acknowledgement of legal and political resistance to such abuses but, alongside this, of the attachment to religious rituals and the beliefs associated with them.
