Feral child Guide, Meaning , Facts, Information and Description
Feral children are children who have lived isolated from human contact starting from a very young age. Their separation from society may be the result of being lost, abandoned, or even taken away by animals. Sometimes abandonment is apparently due to parents rejecting a child's severe intellectual impairment or physical disability. Some feral children experience child abuse or trauma before being abandoned.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. Another famous fictional example is Tarzan. Of course, there's also the American tall tale of Pecos Bill.
In mythology 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 language. 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.
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Genie is the name given to a young girl discovered in a Los Angeles home on November 4 1970, a lifelong victim of bizarre child abuse.
Her father had decided that she was retarded at birth, and because of this subjected her to severe isolation as well as ritual ill-treatment.
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, and it seemed that she had been beaten early on for attempting to make noise.
She was thirteen years old, and for over a decade had been completely restrained, left alone in her room without any sort of human interaction whatsoever.
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.
Genie ended up in an adult foster home. [1]
This is an Article on Feral child. Page Contains Information, Facts Details or Explanation Guide About Feral child Real-Life Cases
Case Study: Genie
See also
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