Unbridled: Stories of Feral Children

When you see Genie, you notice a girl who has a bunny type of walk with her hands up in front of her like paws. Her words seem to be nothing but inane babble and you are disgusted by her constant spitting and clawing at things.

When you first glimpse at Kamala, you notice a mass of matted and unkempt hair. Her eyes are bright and piercing, and she shows her teeth in an attempt to ward you off. Her limbs are malformed after having grown accustomed to walking on all fours, and you might be a little cautious to get near her at all.

These are stories of feral children. Whether through abuse, neglect, or abandonment, feral children exist in a wild or untamed state. They are typically unaware of the needs and desires of others. The concepts of morals, property and possessions are alien to them, and they don't empathize with other people. If brought up by animals, they don't even identify themselves as human. Cut off from society and nurturing human contact, the psychology of these children offer concrete evidence of the effects of environmental stimulus on human cognitive development.

Genie, a girl who was kept in a closet strapped to a potty chair by her father for the first 13 years of her life, provides one of the best documented cases of a feral child. When she was found in 1970, scientists wondered if Genie had a normal learning capacity. Could a nurturing, enriched environment make up for Genie's horrible past? Would it be possible for Genie to recover completely? In order to answer these questions, experiments and studies were conducted by a team of scientists called the "Genie Team." One of the head scientists felt it was important to create a sense of family for her by being there when she woke up, went to bed, and for any important events that would happen throughout the day. This scientist would later become her first foster parent. In the first few months of study, Genie gained a vocabulary of over a hundred words. However, when she communicated it was in high-pitched squeaks and was very limited. Most theorized this was due to the beatings she received from her father if she ever made a sound. They also wondered if her inability to talk was due to the fact she did not have interactions with any other humans while in confinement.

Genie eventually started to run and giggle, and the people she interacted with compared her to an 18-20 month-old infant. If Genie was given a toy, instead of looking at it she would feel it with her fingertips and then put it up to her face to feel it with her lips. When the scientists would take her on outings and to the store she would want to know the names of things almost faster then they could answer her. Even though she was still learning, she could never put words into sentences. The scientists started to wonder if she was mentally retarded-and if so, had she been mentally retarded from birth? Over the next few years, scientists decided Genie was not mentally impaired but was actually brilliantly adept in non-verbal communication. After five years of study, the "Genie Team" lost their governmental funding because the agency which had awarded them the money decided they had not produced enough new information. Some people believed Genie had been over tested by the scientists which might have kept her from learning. After the studies stopped, she was put into foster homes. One of the foster homes abused her for vomiting which caused her to literally keep her mouth shut for several months. Her mother finally admitted her to an adult care home, where to this day she is believed to be. Genie's circumstances lead us to believe abuse at early stages of life can permanently inhibit ones growth.

Kamala and Amala, known as the "wolf girls," were raised by wolves in the woods of Midnapore for the first few years of their lives. Kamala was five and Amala was three when they were discovered in 1920 by Reverend Joseph Singh, a missionary in charge of an orphanage in Northern India. A few days later, he returned with some other men from a local village to capture the girls. They pounded on the mound the girls were in and when the mother wolf came out growling and showing her fangs, the men shot her with arrows. The men then deconstructed the mound and found Kamala and Amala curled up together with wolf cubs. The reverend then took them to his orphanage, where the girls were given clothes which they promptly ripped off their bodies.

The girls possessed little resemblance to humans in the way that they acted and thought. They would only eat raw meat which they were able to smell across three acres of land. Their hearing was incredibly sharp and they had excellent night vision, yet human voices seemed inaudible to both. The only capacity for human emotion they demonstrated was fear. Walking on all-fours for so long caused their joints to develop in a way that made it all but impossible for them to ever walk up-right comfortably. Before the reverend could begin helping the girls emerge into humanity, the youngest one, Amala, grew sick and died. This was a large set-back for Kamala. Kamala had just started to lose her fear of humans when Amala died, putting her into a prolonged state of mourning. The reverend was scared for Kalama's health, but soon Kamala healed sufficiently and he began his program of rehabilitation.

Through the use of massage on Kalama's limbs and by dangling food just out of her reach, he was able to teach her how to stand and walk upright. This was his first step in humanizing her. Although Kalama would often revert to all fours, especially if she was running. When it came to teaching her how to speak the reverend hit a brick wall. Kalama's sister Alama had been making great progress in speech before she died; she was able to babble and coo like an infant. However, with Kalama progress went slower-she learned only twelve words in her first three years of human contact. After several more years she gained a vocabulary of forty words. This would make her between the ages of nine and eleven, whereas most two-year-olds are learning about forty words per week. Many of the words Kalama did know she pronounced improperly. For example, the Hindi word for rice is "bhat," but she would only say "bha." When she was given dolls to play with and a box to keep them in she would hide the dolls in the box and tell the other children at the orphanage, "Bak-poo-voo," which stood for "Baksa-pootool-vootara," meaning "Box-Doll-Inside." Although this broken sentence was a large step for Kalama, it was far from being the type of sentence spoken by a child reared within society. We will never know if Kamala growth was permanently stunted or if she would have grown to learn how to live on her own, because at the age of sixteen she developed typhoid and died.

In most cases that we know, feral children have a very hard time being reintegrated into society. In cases such as Kalama, wolf-children constantly yearn to be allowed to return to the wild. While these examples do not give us enough information to make an inference regarding the lifelong effects of isolation at a young age, they do paint a picture of the human mind untouched by social integration. Whether the setting for child development is a dark closet or the barren wilderness, the impact of societal depravation on the human psyche becomes clear. As explained by Arnold Gesell, a child specialist at Yale University who studied Kalama, "Human culture operates on the mind as a large scale moulding matrix, a gigantic conditioning apparatus."

Written by Mallory Glover

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