Feral Child Real life Cases Case Study Genie See Also

There are reports of such children living with or being reared by wild animals. Legend and fiction also suggest that wolves, bears, or other normally hostile animals often adopt feral children as one of their own. Science, however, has found only a few such cases to study.

Perhaps the best known legendary example is that of Remus and Romulus. A famous example in literature is the character " Mowgli" in Rudyard Kipling's The Jungle Book. Other famous fictional examples are Tarzan and the AmericanAmerican when used as an adjective, can mean of the United States of America or of or relating to the Americas when used as a noun, United States citizen ''residing in the Americas or less frequently American English. English language speakers, especially tall taleA tall tale is a story that claims to explain the reason for some natural phenomenon, or sometimes illustrates how skilled/intelligent/powerful the subject of the tale was. In either case, the tall tale is fictional, and usually obviously so. Very often, of Pecos BillPecos Bill is a mythical American cowboy, immortalized in numerous tall tales. He was invented in the 20th century and is said to have lived during, and been a highly important figure in, the taming of the Western frontier. He embodied idealised cowboy vi.

In mythologyThis article is about a system of myths. For the 1942 book Mythology see its author Edith Hamilton. A mythology is a relatively cohesive set of myths: stories that comprise a certain religion or belief system. What is mythology? Myths are generally storie and literature (in legend and fiction), feral children often grow up with not only normal human intelligence, but also a healthy dose of survival instincts. Integrating them into human society is supposed to be relatively easy. In reality, however, feral children often seem mentally impaired, and in particular have almost insurmountable trouble learning a human languageAs with any complex, emergent concept, language is somewhat resistant to definition; however, most would agree that language is a system of communication or reasoning using representation along with metaphor and some manner of logical grammar. Many langua. They also lack any number of social skills. In any case, converting a feral child into a relatively normal member of any human society is usually unworkable.

1 Real-life cases

2 Case study: Genie

Genie is the name given to a young girl discovered in Los Angeles on November 4 1970, a lifelong victim of bizarre child abuse.

Genie was born in April of 1957; she was the fourth (and second surviving) child to a partially blind mother and a mentally unbalanced father who was 20 years the mother's senior. At the age of 20 months, Genie was just starting on the road to language when a doctor told her family that she seemed a little bit slow, possibly mildly retarded. Genie's father took the opinion into extreme, believing that she was profoundly retarded and subjected her to severe isolation as well as ritual ill-treatment (this was his idea of "protecting" her). Upon her discovery, Genie (13 years and 7 months) was tied to a potty chair and wearing diapers. She possessed no language skills and could only babble like an infant. It was also reported that her father would beat her every time she vocalized and would bark and growl at her like a dog to keep her quiet; he also even forbade his wife and son to ever speak to her. She was 13 years old, and for over a decade had been completely restrained, left alone in her room without any sort of human interaction whatsoever.

The discovery of Genie occurred when Genie's mother finally gained enough courage to desert her domineering husband. She managed to successfully run away from her home and take Genie with her. Genie, her mother, and her maternal grandmother came into a welfare office in Temple City, California to seek benefits for the blind. A social worker at the office discovered Genie and thought that she was 6 or 7 years old and had autism. When it was revealed that she was actually 13 going on 14, the worker immediately called her supervisor who called the police. Genie was immediately sent to Childrens Hospital for malnutrition and rehabilitation, and her parents were charged with willful gross neglect of a minor. On the day that her parents were to appear in court, Genie's father shot himself to death. The charges on the mother were dropped when it was revealed that she, too, was a victim of domestic abuse.

When released for the first time, Genie affected a strange "bunny walk" and constantly spat and clawed. She was almost entirely silent. Through sleep studies, scientists were able to detect abnormal brain waves, so it seemed that Genie was brain damaged. (They were unsure of whether this was the result of her years of isolation or if she had actually been born that way.)

Though initially showing great progress, Genie soon hit a wall in her language acquisition. She never really learned language structure and only got so far as phrases like "Applesauce buy store". Linguists and scientists wanted to learn whether language could be learned past puberty (see Lenneberg's Critical Age Hypothesis ), but because Genie was brain-damaged, the studies were not nearly conclusive enough. In addition, much controversy arose as to the validity and usefulness of many of the experiments conducted on the girl, and funding was cut off.

When Genie was 18, she returned to the care of her mother. However, after a few months, her mother found her too difficult to handle, and Genie was placed in a series of foster homes. In one of the homes, she was severely punished for vomiting, which caused her to be afraid to open her mouth for several months. Today, Genie lives in an adult foster home where she is hidden away from all eyes of the public and will stay. Her older brother is also still alive today.

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3 See also

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