Documentary Analysis: Genie The Feral Childhood

Katy Meredith

Genie the Feral child

Genie a feral child born in 1957 in California, was imprisoned until the time she was 13 now she is currently 58-59 years old, at thirteen years old she had the body of a six year old and still wore nappy's. While imprisoned genie was never taught to speak and when she was released could not talk as she didn’t know any language or she could barely walk. She had compulsive silence and showed inappropriate behaviour. Social workers believed that is was obvious that she as being mistreated. She had the language and motor skills of a baby.

Genie showed insensitivity to temperature while living with foster parents when they allowed her to run her own bath and she would run it ice cold and it wouldn’t be no different to her.

She is now mentally unable to do anything a normal human would be able to do. Whenever genie would make a noise her father would bark like a dog or he would beat her, therefore she had no idea of a language or communication other than a bark. Genie only understood around 20 words when she was 13 years old and they were mostly negative words for example 'stop it' 'no' and 'naughty'.

Scientists and psychologists believed that Clark committing suicide also would've effected genie so they assessed her a lot more to see how she dealt with it.

Genies case was a gift to the world as it helped answer a lot of questions, a lot of professors and so on wanted to study genies case as it helped them answer a lot of questions about language an development for example 'do you have to learn language and speech when you are young or can you start at any point of your life?'

Genie is now in a private mental institution in Los Angelo's, the whereabouts exactly are unknown to anyone, as carer's believe that she is better left alone.

Her mother Dorothy was visiting