The unknown world of Feral Children- by Kirsty Malins
The term "feral" means wild or undomesticated. What's first thing that springs to mind as you read those words? An animal? Untamed? How about child?
As uncommon as it is, it still does happen.
"Monkey boys", "Wolf girls", "Gazelle boys", and even an "Ostrich boy"; are all part of the few documented cases of feral children. Also known as "wild children", these are the people who have grown up with little or no human contact, and they are therefore unaware of any social behaviour or language. Some are thought to have been raised by animals, some have reportedly fended for themselves in the wild, and others are victims of abuse, having grown up in the forced isolation of cages or basements.
We all know and have heard of "The Jungle Book". The young boy Mogli who was raised by wolves in the wild, but is eventually reunited with humanity and is taught the ways of man. You'd be surprised by the number of documented cases that tend to support this premise. The child starts leading the life of the animal, learning to communicate with them, adopting the same diet and more or less mirroring what they see in the models in front of them but when recovered, unlike Mogli, none are able to adjust back into modern society completely.
Being sceptical of nature, I usually find most claims too incredible to be true, but there is a considerable amount of evidence and history available about feral children. While many of the historical cases are unreliable, other records of feral children defy a simple explanation and are hard to ignore that they existed.
From 1724, there are records describing a naked, black haired boy who was found running up and down in the fields of the German town of Hamelin. The "creature" was taken into town, and immediately became a great interest to the town's people. ...
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Being sceptical of nature, I usually find most claims too incredible to be true, but there is a considerable amount of evidence and history available about feral children. While many of the historical cases are unreliable, other records of feral children defy a simple explanation and are hard to ignore that they existed.
From 1724, there are records describing a naked, black haired boy who was found running up and down in the fields of the German town of Hamelin. The "creature" was taken into town, and immediately became a great interest to the town's people. He behaved like a wild trapped animal, eating birds and vegetables raw. He then lived with King George I, where he spent the rest of his life. During his shortened life, he never learnt to talk, showed no interest in money, and was never seen laughing. However, he did show love for music.
Other cases from this era include Victor, who was discovered foraging for roots and acorns in a woodland in France, 1799. He appeared to be 11/12 years old, but he was unable to speak. Similar to the case in 1724, Victor behaved like a wild animal and he too never went on to develop mentally in his lifetime despite the help of scientist Dr Jean-Marc-Gaspard Itard.
Some feral children have been discovered in more recent history. Perhaps the saddest case of a feral child is a girl called Genie. On November 4th, 1970 she was brought into a welfare office in California by her mother, who claimed that she and her daughter were victims of abuse from the woman's husband. Genie appeared to be about six of seven years old, but when the social worker learned that Genie was actually thirteen years old, she contacted the police. It was soon revealed that Genie had been locked away in a room alone for over ten years. She had been tied to a potty-chair and left to sit alone day after day. At night, she was tied into a sleeping bag which restrained her arms, and placed in an over-sized crib with a cover made of metal screening. Often she was forgotten, and had to spend the night tied to the potty chair.
At first, people could hardly believe that Genie was thirteen years old; she weighed only 59 pounds and was 54 inches tall. While she seemed to understand a few words, the only words she could say were "stop it" and "no more." She had a strange bunny-like walk, possibly due to malformed limbs. She held her hands up in front of her like paws and moved in a halting way. She could not chew solid food and could hardly swallow. She spat and sniffed constantly. She was not toilet-trained and could not focus her eyes beyond 12 feet.
A team of scientists known as "the Genie Team" began working with Genie in a controversial multi-year research project. Some people felt that the experiments took away any chance for Genie to have a normal life, but the researchers made efforts to give Genie positive social contact by making her part of the head researcher's family, taking her on outings, and letting her see the world. Because Genie proved incapable of learning language beyond very simple sentences, scientists at first thought she might be mentally handicapped; but she proved to be quite intelligent, scoring perfectly on an adult-level test that measured spatial abilities, and scoring the highest recorded results ever on tests that measure a person's ability to make sense out of chaos and to see patterns. Research stopped after the scientists lost their funding, and Genie was moved to a series of foster homes. Today she lives anonymously in an assisted living facility somewhere in Southern California.
These stories do far more than just to confirm the important role of education. They actually show that a human being not only can but must be educated to become a human being at all. A bear does not have to learn to be a bear; he simply is one. A duck needs no lessons in becoming a duck. And an ant leads a perfectly satisfactory life without any instruction from other ants. Even when isolated from birth, animals usually retain clearly recognizable instincts. A cat that is raised among dogs, will still behave like a cat. He won't try to bite the postman. There are only a few exceptions, such as the lion cub, which would not be able to hunt the wildebeest when raised in isolation.
Man, however, enters this world very poorly equipped. The knowledge a child needs to become fully human is not dormant. Everything the child eventually knows, or can do, must be learned. This of course excludes natural body functions, such as breathing, as well as the reflexes, for example the involuntary closing of the eye when an object approaches it. Everything else, however, must be learned.
