Genie: the story of a girl isolated from birth

Genie's Story it is one of the best examples of how far human cruelty can go.

We are going to delve into the story of the life of this American girl and what were the implications that her tragic case meant for different psychology studies that otherwise would never have been able to place.

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Genie: a summary of her isolation case from childhood

Little Genie (name later assigned by a doctor who treated her) was born in the city of Arcadia, state of California (USA) in 1957. Her father was Clark, a man with a strong depression caused by the death of her mother in a car accident, many years before. Her mother was Irene, a woman 20 years younger than Clark, who suffered constant physical abuse from her husband. Genie also had an older brother, John. There were two other births prior to Genie, but they did not survive.

Genie didn't say her first words until she was almost two years old. She was evaluated by a doctor who concluded that perhaps the girl had an intellectual disability. This event marked a turning point in Genie's life, since from this moment, her father, Clark,

she would decide that she couldn't risk her daughter suffering the dangers of the outside world, and she took the drastic and cruel resolution to isolate the girl in a room, depriving her of practically all stimuli.

Since then, and until she was 13 years old, Genie spent every day of her life locked in a room, chained to a chair that had a urinal attached to it. To sleep, he forced her to enter a cage, only equipped with a kind of sleeping bag. To make matters worse, Clark did not allow Genie to speak or make any sound, under penalty of hitting her or faking wild animal noises to scare her. Genie's stimulation, therefore, was reduced to almost zero, at all levels.

Regarding food, Genie was equally deprived. All her maintenance throughout those infernal years consisted of a kind of cereal porridge for children, sometimes accompanied by a boiled egg. Also, she was always fed directly into her mouth, so she didn't even learn to fend for herself in that regard. The only person going in and out of Genie's room was her father.For he did not allow anyone else to enter, not even her mother or her brother.

The only objects that she was able to have inside the room were old television guides at that Clark had previously cut out photos, waterproof clothing, or some packaging of food. Her communication with her was limited to short and authoritarian phrases, such as "enough", "stop" or "no". Not surprisingly, when the case came to light and Genie was 13 years old, she was only able to understand about 20 words, as she had never been taught the language in a conventional way.

Although the total isolation was solely for Genie, the rest of her families did not enjoy wide freedom either. Clark did not allow the habitual exits of the house, and did not even allow them to speak in a high tone, reason why Genie never listened to them (they were prohibited the direct communication, obviously). Clark's psychological subjugation towards her family was such that she would sometimes take her gun, with the magazine on, and simply look at them, in a challenging attitude.

Discovery of the Genie case

It is not clear how it happened, but In 1970, Irene fled from the hell that was that house, and took John and Genie with her. Irene had no financial means to subsist, and she was practically blind. In search of a way out, she went to a charity office in Temple City. The woman who tended to them quickly turned her attention to Genie and her peculiar behavior, which she clashed with what might be expected of a creature of her age.

She thought that Genie might be a girl with autism. She made unintelligible noises, her gaze was lost, and she maintained a strange postural behavior, resembling that she was holding on to some bars that were not really there. Her physical appearance resembled that of a 6 or 7 year old girl, although she was wearing diapers. However, when the social worker discovered that she was actually 13 years old, she did not hesitate to contact the person in charge of the office, who in turn called the police.

The State immediately assumed custody of Genie, and both Irene and, of course, Clark, were charged with gross negligence and continued child abuse. It was at this point that the world learned of Genie's shocking case, and she began treating her and studying her behavior and her language.

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Later years

The social services of the State of California assumed the cost of the treatments that Genie needed to she will achieve the learning that she should have experienced in her early years and from which she was deprived by the actions of her dad. In this way,the girl began a therapy that allowed her to improve her language, allowing her to learn new words and build short sentencesher, but she never reached the level that would correspond to a person without sensory deprivation.

However, after 4 years of treatments, the budget with which these therapies were maintained was closed, so Genie stopped receiving this help. For this reason, it is not known the extent that the treatment could have had and the improvements that the little girl could have. experienced if there had not been that time limit that occurred to them and that prevented the completion of the original plan they had for help Genie.

Also, after a series of lawsuits, her biological mother regained custody of her, but she actually took care of her for a very short time, so Genie began a painful pilgrimage through a series of shelters that led to regressions to her state initial. In some of these places Genie was mistreated again, an ordeal that explains why the girl returned to having the behaviors that she carried out in her confinement. For example, she stopped pronouncing the phrases she learned to never speak again.

To this day, there is hardly any data on how the subsequent years in Genie's life passed. For privacy, the only thing known is that she spends her days in an adult center in Los Angeles, and that her mother has already passed away.

Psychological studies

Genie's story is an absolute human drama, and it's a situation that shouldn't have happened in any way. However, once her case was discovered, A series of psychological investigations were carried out in this regard to evaluate the effects that sensory deprivation in childhood had caused to this girl, an experiment that, logically, any ethical committee would have forbidden to carry out but that, on this occasion, had unfortunately occurred in real conditions.

What psychologists wondered was how much of human behavior is determined by genetics and which is due to the environment in which they have been raised, a dichotomy that has generated huge amounts of studies. This occasion was an opportunity to check out some of these questions. For example, they tried to find out if language was an innate or a learned skill. With much effort, they managed to get Genie to learn the grammar and vocabulary for a 3- or 4-year-old, but they couldn't go any further.

At the impulse control level, Genie had rage attacks in which she did not vocalize her (because she had not been allowed as a child), but she hit objects and the ground, or scratched her face. Furthermore, she did not have any type of sexual inhibition, and she habitually initiated masturbatory behaviors no matter where she was or who was present at the time. In fact, she often tried to get others to participate in this activity.

Failure to enjoy normal mobility throughout her early years had caused both her arms and legs to atrophy, and she was unable to walk normally, so on many occasions he used the quadruped to move through the spaces. Likewise, she had no control over her toilet training. She used to wearing diapers, she urinated and defecated on any occasion, without any willfulness about it.

With many difficulties, the specialists were able to teach him some tasks, such as dressing without needing outside help. However, by interrupting the treatments, she could not continue with these teachings and it is not possible to know how far Genie would have gone in recovering from her. But the line that separated altruistic help from mere experimentation was very blurred, and that was the trigger to interrupt the program and for the little girl to go into total anonymity.

Bibliographic references:

• Curtiss, S. (2014). Genie: a psycholinguistic study of a modern-day wild child. Perspectives in Neurolinguistics and Psycholinguistics. Academic Press Inc.
• Fromkin, V., Krashen, S., Curtiss, S., Rigler, D., Rigler, M. (1974). The development of language in Genie: a case of language acquisition beyond the “critical period”. Brain and language. Elsevier.
• LaPointe, L.L. (2005). Feral children. Journal of medical speech-language pathology.