Genie (feral Child)

Genie (feral Child)

Genie is the pseudonym of a feral child who was the victim of one of the most severe cases of abuse and neglect ever documented. She spent most of her first thirteen years of life locked inside a bedroom, strapped to a child's toilet or bound inside a crib with her arms and legs immobilized. Genie's abuse came to the attention of Los Angeles child welfare authorities on November 4, 1970.

In the first several years after Genie's life and circumstances came to light, psychologists, linguists and other scientists focused a great deal of attention on Genie's case, seeing in her near-total social isolation an opportunity to study acquisition of language skills and linguistic development. Scrutiny of their new-found human subject enabled them to publish academic works testing theories and hypotheses identifying critical periods during which humans learn to understand and use language. During the course of their research, Genie gradually started to acquire and develop new language skills. When funding and research interest eventually waned and she was placed in new foster homes, those skills regressed.

She was originally cared for at Children's Hospital Los Angeles, and her living arrangements later became the subject of rancorous debate and litigation. She was repeatedly uprooted, first moving to the homes of the researchers who studied her, then into foster care, her mother's house, and then through a series of institutions for disabled adults where she experienced further physical and emotional abuse. As of 2008, she was in psychological confinement as a ward of the state of California and living in a private facility for mentally underdeveloped people; her real name and current residence remain undisclosed. Genie's case has been extensively compared with that of Victor of Aveyron, an eighteenth-century French child whose life similarly became a case study for research on delayed development and language acquisition.