'Feral child' baffled scientists as she never learned how to speak even after being rescued from her abusive father
Kit Roberts
Featured Image Credit: TLC via YouTube
In 1970, a little girl shocked a county welfare office when she entered with her mother.
Many of the welfare officers had believed that the child was around seven years old.
She had a stooped posture, spat, was incontinent, and couldn't speak, and weighed only 59lb.
In fact, she was not six or seven, but 13 years old when she first encountered welfare officers.
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The child was later given the name Genie to protect her identity, and has gone down as one of the most infamous cases of child abuse in the US.
Genie was described as 'feral', showing behaviour which was comparable to that of children who had not had any human contact growing up.
She couldn't speak at all, and was also unable to fully extend her limbs, to chew and swallow, or to fully focus her eyes.
Genie baffled social workers, and her strange condition was the result of years of horrific abuse.
Genie's father Clark Wiley didn't want children, finding them noisy, but five years into his marriage children arrived regardless.
Wiley went on to inflict years of horrific abuse on all his children.
Wiley would lock Genie alone in a small room, constrained in a kind of straight jacket, a wire-mesh covered crib, or harnessed to a potty seat.
Her father demanded silence, and would enforce his demand by beating her with his hands and a piece of wood.
In the end Genie's mother Irene fled the house, taking Genie with her.
It was then that Genie wandered into the welfare office and was finally spotted by welfare officers.
In the end, Wiley was charged with child abuse but shot himself before a court appearance.
A suicide note read: "The world will never understand."
After her rescue Genie became a ward of the State of California and was taken into programs for her care and protection.
During this time she was also the subject of scientific study as during her abuse she had been completely deprived of any of the usual social contact which allows humans to develop.
As a result not could she not speak at all, she was never fully able to develop a first language despite picking up a relatively broad vocabulary.
Susan Curtiss, a UCLA linguistics profess who studied Genie, told the Guardian: "She was smart. She could hold a set of pictures so they told a story. She could create all sorts of complex structures from sticks. She had other signs of intelligence.
"Genie definitely engaged with the world. She could draw in ways you would know exactly what she was communicating."
Genie's case led researchers to think that there is some 'cut off point' in human development after which it is no longer possible for us to fully acquire skills such as language, perhaps between the ages of five and 10.
There is no public record of whether Genie still alive, but enquiries from academics in 2016 indicated that she was 'well', though there is also no public record of her being alive since 2023.
If she were, she would be 67 years old.