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Genie (feral child)
Genie is a name used for a wild child found in Los Angeles, USA in 1970. She had spent most of her life locked in her bedroom. Genie is not her real name, that remains classified.
Californian authorities discovered Genie on November 4 1970 in Los Angeles suburb of Arcadia. She was 13 and still wearing diapers. She could not really talk - her parents had beaten her if she had made any noise. Only words she knew were "stop it" and "no more". His father had apparently decided that she was retarded and kept her locked up and tied to her potty chair. In effect, she had spent all her life in solitary confinement. She spat, sniffed and clawed constantly.
Her parents were charged with child abuse. Genie was taken to Children's Hospital in Los Angeles. Soon after her father shot himself. Genie's mother put all the blame on him.
Despite of her condition, hospital staff was hoping that they could nurture her to normality. When the interest of the case widened, Genie became an unofficial science program to find out if there was a critical age threshold for language acquisition.
In a couple of months she had advanced to one-word answers and learned to dress herself. Her doctors predicted complete success. They even screened Francois Truffaut's movie The Wild Child for ideas. Psychologist James Kent became her surrogate parent.
One year later Genie had rash. Her teacher Jean Butler claimed it was German measles and as a quarantine measure, she was moved to her home. She became her new foster parent and kept him away from the other members of the Genie team. Genie began to hoard things in her room. When Butler applied to be Genie's official foster parent, she was rejected.
Genie returned to the Children's Hospital and couple of hours later was handed to a new foster parent, therapist David Rigler. His wife Marilyn became Genie's new teacher and she stayed with the family for the next four years. During that period he began to learn some language and Riglers arranged her to learn sign language. She also learnt to smile. If she could not create a sentence, she would try to communicate by drawing a picture.
However, the National Institute of Mental Health, who had funded the project, grew concerned for lack of scientific research data. In 1974 they cut off funding. Next year Riglers decided to stop being foster parents. Genie had not learned full grammatical English.
In 1975 Genie was returned to live with her mother, who had been acquitted of child abuse charges. After few months she found out that taking care of Genie was too hard and Genie was transferred to a succession of six foster homes. In some of those foster homes she was physically abused and her development regressed badly.
The original research team heard nothing about Genie until her mother sued them for excessive testing. The case was eventually settled.
Genie lives in a sheltered accommodation in an undisclosed location in Southern California.
Books
- Russ Rymer - Genie: Scientific Tragedy