Genie Wiley: The Terrible Story of the Wild Girl

Throughout history, there have been several cases of wild children raised in social isolation with little or no contact with other humans. But few have captured public and scientific attention like that of a girl named Genie Wiley.

She spent most of her childhood locked in a room, isolated and mistreated for more than a decade. Genie’s case was one of the first to test the critical learning period theory.

Can a child raised under complete deprivation of contact with other people and in isolation develop language patterns?

Can a nurturing environment make up for such a horrible past?

Genie’s Background

Genie’s story came to light on November 4, 1970, in Los Angeles, California. A social worker discovered a 13-year-old girl after her mother ran away from home with the girl and went to social services. The worker soon discovered that the girl had been confined to a small room, and a subsequent investigation by authorities revealed that the girl had spent most of her life in this room, often tied to a small chair.

Genie’s story began at 20 months of age, after her birth in 1957. Believing she was mentally retarded, Clark Wiley locked her daughter in a room, separating her from her almost blind mother and 6-year-old brother, under the pretext of protecting it.

The girl was given the name Genie in the case files, to protect her identity and privacy. However is not the girl’s real name, The term Genie, according to Dr. Jeanne Butler, one of the specialists who worked with the girl, comes from the idea of ​​a magical spirit locked in a bottle, waiting to go out.

Both parents were accused of abuse, but Genie’s father committed suicide the day before his appearance at the trial, leaving a note saying: “The world will never understand it.”

Genie’s life before its discovery was an absolute deprivation. She spent most of her days tied and naked in her small chair and was only able to move her hands and feet. When she made a noise, her father beat her. Both her father, mother, and older brother rarely spoke to her. The few times her father interacted with her, it was barking or growling.

The history of her case soon spread, attracting the attention of both the public and the scientific community. The psycholinguist Harlan Lee considered it a case of vital importance, because “our morality allows us to carry out experiments on the deprivation of human beings, and these unfortunate people are all that we have to go on.”

With so much interest in her case, the question became what should be done with her now. A team of psychologists and language experts started what could be Genie’s rehabilitation process.

Speech Study

The National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) provided the necessary funds for scientific research into the Genie case.

Upon arrival, the team met a girl who weighed only 59 lb and moved strangely as with “bunny feet.” She often spat and was unable to straighten her arms and legs. She did not speak, had incontinence, and was unable to chew, at first it seemed he was only able to recognize her own name and the word “cure”.

After evaluating Genie’s emotional and cognitive abilities, James Kent described her as “the most deeply damaged child I have ever seen … Genie’s life is a desert.” Her silence and inability to use language made it extremely difficult to assess her mental abilities, but in the tests that were done at that time, the cognitive level of one year of age was obtained.

Soon she began to make rapid progression in specific areas, she quickly learned to use the toilet and dressing. In the coming months, she experienced even more progress in her development but continued to be poor in areas like language. She enjoyed hiking all day outside the hospital and exploring her new surroundings with an intensity that surprised her caregivers and strangers. Curtiss suggested that Genie had a great ability to communicate non-verbally, often receiving gifts from strangers who seemed to understand the young woman’s powerful need to explore the world around her.

Despite exceeding the critical period age level for a year, Genie quickly began adding new words to her vocabulary. She started by learning single words and eventually started putting two words together in the way young children do when they are learning to speak. Curtiss began to feel that Genie would be fully capable of language acquisition.

After a year of treatment, Genie even started putting three words together from time to time. In normal children who go through language development, this stage is followed by what is known as a language explosion. Children quickly acquire new words and begin to put them together in novel ways. Unfortunately, this never happened with Genie. Her language skills remained stagnant at this stage and she seemed unable to apply grammatical rules and use language in a meaningful way. At this point, her progress stalled and her acquisition of the new language stopped.

Despite the relative success, the American Mental Health Association felt that the scientific merit of the girl’s years of study was dubious and that she was spending unnecessary money. For this reason, in 1974 the budget for Genie was suspended. This, when Dr. Butler’s constant accusations that the girl had indeed undergone an involution and that she was not allowed to see her mother, caused the Riglers to relinquish custody of the girl in 1975. Genie, without However, he learned short phrases like “Shop to buy applesauce.”

Later Years

After a custody trial, the girl was sent to her mother, who had operated on her eyesight and who after a few months realized that taking care of Genie was a very difficult task. But, because the legal terms of the trial stated that Genie’s original team doctors had no right to approach her, the woman made the decisions she believed appropriate, without consulting anyone. Ultimately, Genie lived in six adoptive homes, some of which she was once again mistreated and regressed, especially after a certain incident in one of them, where, after being severely punished (it is not known exactly how) for vomiting. Again acquired the fear of opening her mouth, so she stopped talking again.

Genie’s Life Today

Due to the court order, little is currently known about Genie publicly. All that is known is her mother who died around 2002, her brother John attended high school for at least a year, who is still alive and that she is in an adult care facility located near Los Angeles. While his whereabouts are fairly well known, avoid disclosure for ethical reasons. We will never know the degree of development that we could achieve if we continued with his cognitive therapy.

There is an independent film called “Mockingbird Don’t Sing” based on the Genie story (not explicitly named, for fear of legal trouble), as well as a song by indie group Killjoy Confetti called Crooked Teeth.

With Genie approaching her 64th birthday, her fate remains an enigma. Did she finally learn to speak? is she happy? Only a handful of people know this.

What has remained at the end of all this is a long ethical debate on the claims of study and the generation of new knowledge, passing over the vital and emotional needs of people, as has happened to poor Geni who, after passing From hand to hand by different researchers and foster homes, it was finally abandoned to its fate in an institution and was forgotten when it stopped being “interesting”.