Everything Everywhere Daily: History, Science, Geography & More - Genie The Feral Child

Episode Date: May 4, 2021

In October 1970, a blind woman accidentally walked into a Los Angeles County welfare office with a child in tow. The staff in the office immediately noticed the odd girl with the woman. She walked funny, was emaciated, drooling, didn’t make a sound, and when asked, the woman mentioned that the girl was 13. The staff thought she looked like she was seven. This began one of the saddest cases of child welfare in history, and one which fascinated researchers for years. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In October 1970, a blind woman accidentally entered a Los Angeles County welfare office with a child in tow. The staff in the office immediately noticed the odd girl with the woman. She walked funny, was emaciated, drooling, and didn't make a sound. And when asked, the woman mentioned the girl was 13. The staff thought she was seven. This began one of the saddest cases of child welfare in history and one which fascinated researchers for years. Learn more about Jeannie, the Farrell Child, on this episode of everything everywhere daily.

What if your perceptions about the past were wrong? ThruLine is a podcast that takes you back in time to uncover the parts of the story that may have gone unnoticed. It effectively turned day into night. And how it shaped the world now. Time travel with us every week on the ThruLine podcast from NPR. The case of Jeannie is one of the worst documented cases of child abuse in recorded history. Jeannie, which is not her real name, was a pseudonym given to her to protect her identity.

She was born in 1957. Jeannie's father was not a good guy. He was abusive to his wife trying to control her to prevent her from ever leaving the house. He had no interest in having children, although he had five of them. The first two children died. The first died ten weeks after he was born from catching pneumonia after being kept in the garage. The second child may have died due to a genetic defect known as R-H incompatibility, or possibly choking on its own mucus.

A third child, a boy, was born five years before Jeannie. He was raised in condition similar to Jeannie where the father would beat him if he made any noise, but eventually the boy's grandmother took over his care. Up until the age of 20 months, Jeannie was raised and treated as a normal child. The one issue she had was a congenital dislocated hip, which delayed her ability to learn to walk. It was at this point when Jeannie was 20 months old that her father's mother died. They were described as having an abnormally close relationship. The father then moved into the grandmother's house,

and it was then when Jeannie's father kept Jeannie confined to a bedroom. She wasn't just confined to a room, however. She would spend the majority of every day chained to a child's toilet, and the only thing she was ever allowed to wear was a homemade straight jacket. Her room was almost totally dark, with the window only occasionally being left open to allow her to see some sky. If Jeannie made the slightest sound, her father would come in and beat her.

He prevented anyone from speaking to Jeannie or having any contact with her. He was extremely paranoid, not allowing anyone in the family out of the house other than his son going to school. Likewise, no one ever came into the house, and none of his neighbors had a clue that they had another child. In all of this, Jeannie's mother was also beaten by her father. She was legally blind by this time, which left her unable to protect her children. In 1970, when Jeannie was 13 and a half, her mother and father had a violent argument.

When Jeannie's father left the house one day, her mother took Jeannie and left to go to a government office to apply for disability benefits. However, she accidentally entered the wrong office, and instead entered the office of social services. The staff there was shocked at what they saw. Jeannie could barely walk. She walked with a hop like a rabbit and held her hands out as if they were paws. She couldn't speak. She could barely chew her own food. She just had a blank stare on her face with absolutely no expression.

The staff was stunned to find out that she was 13. She was so malnourished and her growth so stunted she looked to be seven years old. Jeannie was immediately taken into protective custody and sent to the Los Angeles Children's Hospital. The case made international news. Jeannie's father refused to talk to the police or the media, and the day before he was supposed to appear in court on child abuse charges, he killed himself. In a note he left behind, he said, quote, the world will never understand. Well, he was right about that. Jeannie was a feral child. A feral child is something that rarely occurs,

and there have only been a few documented cases in history anywhere on earth. A feral child is one that grows up with no socialization. They may have been abandoned or their parents died, or they escape some trauma by fleeing into the woods. They would grow up without any spoken language, human contact, or understanding how to coexist with other people. The other cases of feral children were children found in wilderness areas. In Jeannie's case, she was found in the middle of a large city. Jeannie became a ward of the state, and at this point she couldn't control her bowels, speak, chew, show facial expressions, and knew nothing about behaving around other people.

She weighed 59 pounds at the age of 13 and a half, and she would eat by letting food dissolve in the saliva of her mouth. even though her eyes were perfectly fine, she couldn't focus on anything more than 10 feet away, which was the size of the room she was kept in almost her entire life. It was here after she was taken in as a word of the state where the story changes. Psychologists and linguists have theories as to how speech in the human brain develops. However, those theories are very difficult to test.

You can't really run controlled experiments, raising children in control groups that aren't allowed to speak. However, in the case of Jeannie, they had an actual sense. subject where they could try to learn how the human brain worked. There was also a team of people who worked on rehabilitating genie. She did know a few words, but probably no more than about six. Her name, mother, orange, blue, go, and sorry. They had a very difficult time determining her mental age, but figured she had a mental age of about 13 months. She was fascinated with objects more than people. She would often try to find the sources of unexpected noises. She would walk alongside strangers and didn't seem to be able to differentiate one person from another.

She didn't enjoy being touched, and she would often spit or blow her nose anywhere or onto anything. She also showed absolutely no sensitivity to temperature. The initial results were promising. Jeannie quickly learned to chew, dress herself, use the toilet, and enjoy music. When intelligent tests were administered, researchers found that Jeannie had intelligence. As one researcher said, the lights were on. She could communicate via pictures and she could draw. She wasn't disabled per se. She had just suffered extreme neglect for an extended period of time, exactly when a human brain develops and learns how to speak and socialize. Jeannie was learning new words, but she seemed unable to develop any sort of ability to understand grammar. Here is the transcript

of one of her sessions where she describes her father. Quote, Father hit arm, big wood, genie cry, not spit, father, hit face, spit. Father hit big stick. Father angry. Father hit Jeannie Big Stick. Father take piece of wood hit. Cry. Me cry.

While she didn't grasp grammar, Jeannie scored incredibly high in tests that focused on the right side of her brain. She scored the highest score ever on some spatial awareness test and the highest score in the medical literature at the time on the Mooney face test. A working theory was that her right brain overcompensated due to the lack of development in her left brain, which handles things like grammar and language. Eventually, Jeannie became the center of a dispute amongst the researchers and caregivers. In 1974, the National Institute of Mental Health withdrew its funding due to the lack of scientific findings. Researchers began fighting over the ethics of studying her versus her own well-being. She was put in a foster home with one of the researchers, and eventually in 1975 she moved in with her mom. who had regained her sight after cataract surgery.

However, this was short-lived, and she eventually bounced between foster homes where she was further abused and beaten by some of her foster families, which only made her regress. When she turned 18, her mother, who had become her legal guardian again, forbade researchers from having any further contact with Jeannie. After that, she disappeared from the researchers and from the public eye. Little has been known of Jeannie since then. One of her researchers saw her during her 27th birthday party in 1984 and said she looked despondent and didn't communicate. In 2000, a television crew hired a private investigator who found her living in a state-run foster care facility for adults and said she was doing well and was happy.

As of today, Jeannie is still alive at the age of 64, living somewhere in Southern California. Her case has become famous in linguistic and psychology circles. Many papers have been written about her and she was the subject of several documentaries and the subject of countless debates about research ethics. If there's anything positive that can be taken away from the case of Jeannie, one of the worst cases of child abuse and neglect in history, it's that we have a slightly better understanding of how the human brain develops and how we learn languages.

That being said, there's no excuse for what happened to Jeannie, and hopefully there will never be another case like hers again. The associate producer of Everything Everywhere daily is Thor Thompson. If you'd like to support the show, please donate over at patreon.com. There is content only available to supporters, merchandise, and even opportunities for a show producer credit. If you know someone you think would enjoy the show, please share it with them. Also remember, if you leave a five-star review, I'll read your review on the show.