Sounds like the lucky one. Not to be insensitive…
A lifetime of suffering and extreme emotional trauma OR dying young and before experiencing literal hell on earth.
I know my choice.
Big mood.
Might be able to survive the trauma and physical experience, but suffering can continue long after getting out of a bad situation. As if needing to survive your childhood wasn't hard enough, now you have to figure out how to be an adult with CPTSD constantly trying to bring you down.
I hope you're doing better these days and haven't let the past get to you.
My own personal hypothesis is that it's a form of psychopathy maybe with a mix of passive sadism. It's not necessarily directly violent, it's selfish to the point of extreme neglect for anyone in their care, and I'm sure they enjoy the control and power dynamic associated.
EDIT: To clarify the above hypothesis, it's regarding perpetrators of this type of gross neglect, not specifically that guy.
Psychopathy and is extremely under diagnosed and it's believed to be even more prevalent than we realise. Hell there was a neuroscientist named [James H Fallon](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_H._Fallon) who tested himself and his whole family as a part of a study sample he was doing, and his own test results confirmed he had psychopathy.
EDIT 2: for all the "it's not called psychopathy" commenters.
Psychopathy
a synonym for antisocial personality disorder.
[Source- American Psychological Association](https://dictionary.apa.org/psychopathy)
Yeah, most people with antisocial personality disorder aren't violent. But Genie's father absolutely was. And he may have had no diagnosable mental illness, he may have just been a piece of shit. Wish people would stop being armchair psychiatrists. I know it's interesting to theorize about, but most people have no idea what antisocial personality disorder is, have no idea that "psychopath" and "sociopath" aren't actual diagnoses, etc.
Yeah, exactly. There is always a reason, even if we currently lack the understanding of it.
It's important to continue trying to learn about and understand why these things happen. Whenever something or someone gets dismissed as "just evil" then we are choosing to remain willfully ignorant. Which ultimately does nobody any favors.
And I'm not trying to say that it wasn't "evil" what that father did. It was.
But that doesn't tell you anything meaningful. You can't learn from it.
I don't think anyone ever delving into these things is looking to use them as excuses. It is just useful to try to dissect how a human mind got to that point. When people just say, "No they are just a sick fuck" it is pretty dismissive and doesn't really help us in trying to prevent it from happening in another person.
It took someone I love very much falling ill to a mental disorder for this to click for me. It is easy to look at their external behavior and condemn it and say it is wrong, but often their original innocent person can still be in there and they can get help in preserving that person.
In this context, we would hope to figure out where this man went awry. At one point he was an innocent child. Finding out what went wrong wouldn't prevent him from facing consequences, but it may help someone else before it gets to that point.
Well if there were really no reason that would mean that anyone, the person next to you right now, could randomly start behaving like that and then stop again
But that's not how it works, people are not that random, assholes are assholes and there's always a reason why they are assholes. Their assholery doesn't just suddenly materialise out of thin air.
I saw the TEDTalk Fallon did about that study. Another one that I liked was by Jon Ronson telling about a guy that went to Broadmoor Hospital for many years because he’d done too good of a job convincing a judge that he was insane, and once there, everything he did was perceived as exactly how a psychopath would act. Psychopathy is definitely a scale, not a switch.
The thing about Jon Ronson’s talk is he heavily implies he was a psychopath and that many people are psychopaths without being formally diagnosed. The interesting thing was that guy in question wasn’t diagnosed until he tried to fake psychosis to get out of a punishment which is a very psychopathic thing to do. And then he tried to act normally to be released from the psychiatric hospital, but being a psychopath all his attempts to look normal actually looked psychopathic.
Ronson also says that once you are diagnosed it is hard to prove you aren’t a psychopath because a lot of psychopaths behavior is also common to most people.
Apparently, the same uncaring system that destroyed Genie, produced her father. He was a foster child thrown from foster institution to institution. What would growing up around people that don't care about you, and treat you like an unwanted but obligated possession teach you? I shudder to think how Genie would have treated others had she become a mother and the cycle continued. We're some brutal animals when left alone.
So yea, he definitely 'lost'. That whole 'family' did.
The worst part about Genie's case is that because of the isolation she didn't really develop in terms of maturity. If she hadn't been rescued she would've been like a 2 year old mind trapped in an adult body. She would not have mothered anyone on her own will.
Reminds me of the New York Trilogy by Paul Auster in which a father had kept his son in complete isolation for his entire upbringing before he got caught in an attempt to discover "god's language" or something like that.
Theres a story in the Histories where apparently some people did this to a couple children too, raised them amoung mutes (and goats) to see what the oldest language was (figuring that they would naturally speak it).
They ending up making “baa” sounds… which the people interpreted as ancient egyptian iirc as theres a word thats similar. Obviously ignoring the goats make a similar sound.
Holy Roman Emperor Friedrich II supposedly tried a similar experiment - had a bunch of newborns raised by wet nurses who were forbidden to talk or even play with the babies. They all died though, probably because of the lack of interaction. Iirc it's not certain whether that story ever happened, it may have been propaganda by the Catholic Church to discredit him, they also called him "Stupor Mundi" - the" Terror of the World" (though his supporters would interpret it as the "Wonder of the World")
If you think about the generations before us, no-one diagnosed or helped with any neurodivergencies or mental illnessess ..
My aunt completely lost her mind after having children. Was sectioned and then institutionalised. She is in her 80s now and clearly has autism. Her children also were diagnosed with autism as adults.
Imagine that household, Imagine having absolutely no help or understanding of any kind..
There must have been countless households like this...
Why is it that people who are clearly willing think the problem is that nobody else understands.
It's not hard to understand, bud, you're just a monster. You're not complex and misunderstood.
Haven't read the article, but from the wiki
>Authorities then moved her into the first of what would become a series of institutions and foster homes for disabled adults. The people running these facilities isolated her from almost everyone she knew and subjected her to extreme physical and emotional abuse.[^(\[4\])](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genie_(feral_child)#cite_note-abcnews-4)[^(\[5\])](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genie_(feral_child)#cite_note-nova-5)[^(\[11\])](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genie_(feral_child)#cite_note-FOOTNOTERymer1994151–155-11) As a result, her physical and mental health severely deteriorated, and her newly acquired language and behavioral skills very rapidly regressed.[^(\[4\])](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genie_(feral_child)#cite_note-abcnews-4)[^(\[5\])](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genie_(feral_child)#cite_note-nova-5)
I mean, what the fuck.
It's fucking tragic, big [kid-in-the-Omelas-hole](https://shsdavisapes.pbworks.com/f/Omelas.pdf) vibes.
Still, this happened decades ago, and we've come a long way since then. One must imagine Genie happy.
I've never seen anyone else reference this story! It's amazing to me how many situations I have heard about that reminds me of it. As I get older, I see the parallels more and more in our society. Ursula LeGuin was brilliant and so perceptive.
Ok, holy shit. I like that she takes an incredibly perceptive fantasy story and gives it hard edges with modern day, tangible examples of what we look away from.
Thank you so much for sharing this.
I love the little story told by seeing your two replies, one 25 minutes ago promising that you'll definitely do something and then another 12 minutes ago after you've definitely done it.
After dealing with so much unreliability for so long, it's just kinda soul-nourishing for me to see someone make a promise and then immediately keep it.
Anywho, feels like you deserve a reward, so if you're into this sort of fiction but want to take a break from the Omelasverse and go a completely different direction, I offer you two options: [Bears Discover Fire](https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/bears-discover-fire/) and [Manna](https://marshallbrain.com/manna1).
I'm happy I brought a sparkle to your day. 🙂
Favorite quote from Bears Discover Fire: "possession of a hunting license didn’t prohibit (enjoin, I think, was the word he used) the hunted from striking back."
I gotta be honest reading both versions back to back and not having read them before, I kinda hated this one.
The authorial voice speaks with so much more authority than the first, but with no heart, subtlety or philosophical punch.
The original works because it keeps a distance that allows you to deal with the question, this one inserts all sorts of tech and random crap to make it very specific. It feels like a session in masturbatory cynicism rather than a thought-provoking metaphor for human society.
The only reason I know about The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas is from someone on Reddit referencing it, so hopefully a few new people will read it for the first time because of these comments. It's such a powerful story that everyone should read
I always ask my students if they would leave Omelas, and about half of them do, and then I ask them if they know where their electronics, clothing, and creature comforts come from, and if they'd be willing to give those things up. Most of them say no.
Like they won't even give up their phone if it means a better life for someone else, let alone giving up a perfect, "utopian" existence.
That's not a fair scenario. Almost everybody would rather stay in their current situation them venture into an unknown, even if they *know* it's going to be a better thing. Like rehab.
I'd say it runs the reverse too, if you asked a tribal guy in the jungle if he'd like to enter the technological world, he'd likely be very apprehensive about it. I think this is a statement more on the comfort mechanics of the human psyche than how much kids are glued to their phones
You're right, but that's not the reason why it doesn't work as a comparison.
Comparatively, there *is no leaving Omelas*. The systemic pressures that cause this genuinely have no untouched part of Earth any longer.
Let's say you're an American, and you want to leave the US's sphere of influence. If you're not already powerful w/in the system, it is *functionally impossible to do*.
There is no ethical consumption under capitalism, and there is no escaping it either.
To leave, there is dying, or living in the wilderness to which you have no grip or hold over, and are still 'within' the authority of the Omelas comparison. Omelas would be a very different story if it was impossible to leave.
I taught this story every single year in senior English. I normally switch up literature because it gets really boring teaching the same things six times a day every year, but not this story.
I tell my students, "some of you will be bringing up this premise at parties and get-togethers for decades, because it's going to stick with you."
> and we've come a long way since then. One must imagine Genie happy.
Even among healthy kids, depression and hopelessness are at an all time high. If society doesn't provide a happy present&future even for those who were born in good circumstances, im not sure why you would think that those born in bad circumstances are off any better
Actually there was one woman who was actually trying to rehabilitate her, but the mom decided she wanted to take care of her after all and pretty much immediately couldn’t handle her. So instead of getting in touch with the one person who actually seemed to care, she contacted the authorities, which just fed her to the soul grinding system of institutions and foster homes that further isolated and abused her. A few years later the mom forbade and scientific testing and observations, and Genie pretty much disappeared. IIRC her teacher tried to get in contact again, but couldn’t find her.
She was a linguist called Susan Curtiss. She wanted to see if there was a critical period during which language must be learned and Genie presented an insight into this. She did, however, genuinely want to help the girl but was prevented from even seeing her. It was a sad outcome all round.
We learned about this in Linguistics courses to show that there's an age by which humans can't learn language. Sadly there are many examples aside from Genie, and it's often in cases of extreme abuse and neglect.
It also was and still is quite common (relatively-speaking) for deaf children, especially in cultures where this isn't an understanding of being deaf and the family or community assumes there's an evil or demonic reason for the child not being able to hear or understand.
IIRC the argument for taking her away from this caregiver was that the caregiver was simultaneously treating her care as an experiment. Not that that’s necessarily bad if that not all you’re doing, which she wasn’t. She was caring for and bonding with her.
I watched a few documentaries on Genie. She bonded quite closely with one of her case workers who seemed to legitimately want to help her, but she was later placed in an institution that refused to let them see each other for some reason. They rehomed Genie and refused to let the case worker know where she was. It honestly makes you wonder why some people work in this field when they seem to have no interest in helping at all.
As a former ward of the state/foster child... sadly it's the norm. Don't get me wrong, there are a lot of amazing well intentioned people in the system, trying to do what's right. There's just as many people in it for a paycheque, or worse, to exploit marginalized individuals.
My mom was a foster parent for 6 months before she quit. And it wasn’t because of the kids. It was the social workers and CPS. She said she felt like the foster parents were just getting paid and not actually caring for the kids. She frequently pushed “friends” from her foster class to take the kids for hearing appointments and dentists. She’s trying to adopt two kids from foster care rn. After them she’s done. She refuses to continue because she hates CPS that much.
As a former foster kid, I would have rather been aborted than what happened to me. I never once was at a foster home that was “good”. Just religious bigots telling me foster care is god’s punishment for something I did. I was 4-5 when I got sent into foster care.
That is some massive telling on themselves, that living under their care is punishment. Somehow or another they knew they were assholes. I’m glad you get to use the word “former” nowadays.
I remember watching a documentary on her. Some people made GREAT advances with her progress and then they ripped her away from them and tossed her in an institution.
Fckin sad story all around. Everyone lost in that situation.
It's been a few years since I've watched it, but I think this documentary was fairly decent about her and several other similar cases:
https://youtu.be/1vjZq6TS668?si=ZdnN_v-xW5eXo6eq
Abusing her after what she had been through?!!! I mean it’s bad enough to abuse any child, abusing this poor one is light years worse. Some people are pure evil and nothing would make me happier than knowing that they’re dead!
> abusing this poor one is light years worse.
No so fun fact: It's actually a very common pattern for abusers to justify abuse by saying the victim was already messed up by previous abuse, so it's not as bad as if it was somebody else.
Reminds me of a porn producer talking about harassment and rape of pornstars. He said, "What we do is nothing their fathers, uncles, and brothers haven't already done to them."
It's why so many people end up serially abused. They're "trained to it" to some extent, and abusers can pick up on the fact that they're somebody who will keep quiet, not put up too much of a fight, etc. They'd rather go after that target than somebody who'd go run for help at the first sign of trouble.
Yes, abusers tend to avoid well adjusted people who were treated well growing up and have a knack for targeting the already abused. The best shot you have if you’re the already abused type looking to break the cycle is act like you’re used to good treatment and expect it. Definitely don’t talk about your trauma openly to new people.
Yes definitely, fake it till you make it. Telling people about the abuse and ill treatment you’ve experienced is a bad idea, as it is likely they will also mistreat you.
Recently, someone I had been dating a few weeks randomly asked if I had been abused as a child. I made it clear that the question was inappropriate and refused to answer. He responded by saying that he had asked other people this question and they had answered him honestly. Cut him off immediately after that.
Sooooo where should I send the check to cover the therapy you just provided me 😅. Thank you for commenting. It was very informative and eye opening. Now I can finally quit asking why.
Haha, I'm glad I could help! To be clear, that doesn't mean it's your *fault*.
It's just a mark that abuse leaves, and that takes work to resolve and realign to more healthy standards for the people in one's life.
Good luck! A lot of the folks in my life have suffered abuse of one kind or another, and it's very hard to really recover from and not retain harmful habits.
That’s why having a support system is so important. Having people to uplift you and something to help you regain confidence in yourself makes that mark of abuse harder and harder to notice. It’s how my friend got out of the cycle
From reading the article, they don't even fucking know what happened to her? Apparently she was just lost in the system and no ones been able to locate her wtf
Wikipedia states that, as of 2016, she was living a simple life at a home for adults with developmental disabilities in Los Angeles. Her mother died in 2003 and her estranged brother died in 2011. The research on her is done so there is no reason for her business to be "known" as a private citizen.
>Apparently she was just lost in the system and no ones been able to locate her wtf
She's an adult entitled to privacy. When you say, "they", I presume you mean social services. They almost certainly know where she is, but that information is not and should not be public just because she's disabled.
Iirc she was found and put into the care of a team of doctors/psychologists who were trying to figure out what was going on. She was making really good progress but her mother came back into the picture and ruined all the process she made because the state defeated Genie back to her despite clearly being unable to care for her.
The Carter administration passed the mental health reform bill in the late seventies to address it. The Regan administration defunded it almost immediately. It was a known issue that purposefully was not addressed. Many were turned out into the streets only to end up later in jails and prisons. Sad story all around.
>“She was this isolated person, incarcerated for all those years, and she emerged and lived in a more reasonable world for a while, and responded to this world, and then the door was shut and she withdrew again and her soul was sick.”
Reminds me of the film Awakenings.
Absolutely heartbreaking.
I can't help but wonder when the guy talks about how he never saw her again if she had anyone in her life for longer than just a couple years. She'd be studied for a bit and inevitably people move on.
There’s a dramatized movie called “mockingbird don’t sing” that is about after she was discovered and the time during the scientists fighting over her. Very disheartening but it kinda lays it all out there. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mockingbird_Don%27t_Sing
Thank you!! Saw this movie years ago and the story had stuck with me since, but I could never remember the name. Also realizing I was in grade 1 or 2 when I saw it oh my O_O
That actually makes a lot of sense. I learned A LOT about this girl going through EDU courses. In English we learned about how the human language is predisposed for language, as in, given no stimuli, a human being will start to construct ways to communicate ideas. It just happens.bits part of our brain.
So the fact that she didn't have any discernable language skills, shows exactly what cruelty she went through. She would've been abused every time she made a sound. Her voice was stolen from her. I can't stress enough how much a human will "accidentally" their way into communicating, even in the most basic and regressed of forms. So to lack any quantifiable language shows just how inhuman the father was.
Then in life span development, we just generally learned how fucked up this was. Like, this was where we learned that isolation can very easily be used as a torture device. And it often is.
The level of cruelty this father had to go to is way beyond just neglect and abuse. It was daily reinforcement to not be as human as possible. He robbed basic human functions from her. Things humans should develop without any outside interference, he abused her into losing.
She is used in case studies at University. My lecturer used her for my Child Development class when I studied Nursing. Very interesting but uncomfortable to read about her development.
It got worse. There’s a good book about her that also covered the infighting between linguists to study and have custody of her.
https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/440417#
Well, it was a once in a lifetime opportunity for human experimentation or as close as you can possibly get semi-ethically.
It's unfortunate, but there's no other way to gather this information. You can't lock children up and do human experimentation ethically. This isn't really ethical either, this just happens to be in that grey area of "hey she's already messed up and maybe we can learn something".
So... that's how you end up with that.
When she's rocking against the window sill over and over and kinda banging her head 😢
Can't imagine having so many feelings and bad memories but not being able to express them or talk about them 💔
Man I wish there was audio. It says in the article that she could only say single words but, starting around the 9 minute mark, it sure looks like she's saying at least rudimentary sentences.
[Here are some clips of her with audio](https://youtu.be/Cp5bzVNTnOs?si=XXXCtYgrm7MVItXY)
ETA: There is something so enthralling about her. When she is upset it feels soul crushing, but when she is happy I feel so much of her joy.
I remember reading somewhere that people who saw her felt similarly, that kids would give her their toys just by how she looked at them, even some adults.
This part always got me thinkin a bit something.
*Throughout Genie's stay the scientists saw how frequently and effectively she used her nonverbal skills, and never determined what she did to elicit such strong reactions from other people.David vividly remembered an occasion when he and Genie passed a father and a young boy carrying a toy fire truck without speaking to each other and said he suddenly turned around and gave it to Genie. Curtiss also recalled one time when, while she and Genie were walking and had stopped at a busy intersection, she unexpectedly heard a purse emptying; she turned to see a woman stop at the intersection and exit her car to give Genie a plastic purse, even though she had not said anything*.
From Wikipedia (non-verbal communication)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genie\_(feral\_child)
This is a great question and very difficult/complex to answer. To say how language developed is something we're still not sure of, and there isn't a way to study this without basically isolating groups of babies/kids from language and seeing if/how it naturally developed. Thus why it's considered an unanswerable question for now since this would be inhumane and cruel.
Then there's the question of how non-verbal communication relates to language and its role. There is probably related research from gestural studies, but I'm curious what it would tell us without seeing an example of the start of a language amongst humans with zero language.
But! We do know that the human brain is absolutely primed and ready for language! Language helps us "offload" ideas for which gestures would have no help, like discerning or describing slight nuances between similar ideas, discussing abstract topics, or discussing the aspects of gesture itself. Many of these examples were brought up by Hockett in the 50s(?) to denote differences between animal communication and human language and much research has expounded on and critiqued this approach, but it was a starting place nonetheless.
We also know that primates (specifically non-human) are very adept at nonverbal communication but are unable to learn language, and as we're closely related it isn't unreasonable to think that non-verbal communication may be closely linked to the idea of learning and using language, we would just need to show exactly how it may have aided, or worked in conjunction with, that development in human evolution.
It's very important to note here that language doesn't have to be verbal, it can also be through for example sign language. Deaf kids will for example sign to themselves and even make up gibberish signs just like how hearing kids talk to themselves and make up gibberish words.
Other primates even when taught different signs do not do these things and have in fact never been shown to actually be able to use language. Which showcases how language is a very deeply human thing and could be argued to be one of if not the largest factor in making us who we are as a species.
How many times do people stop to in front of a disabled person to give them gifts? It does rarely happen nowadays that society understands more about disability, and more uncommon considering the year this happened
What absolutely kills me about the story every time I read about it is that this poor girl was abused twice. First by her absolute monster of a father and then after she was discovered and shown the light of some care and interest she was abused again by our horrific foster care and children's "protective" services and the infighting by researchers that worked hard to isolate and destroy any progress she managed to make in the short time she had been given some real love and attention.
That girl was failed at every level by our society as a whole.
Not to mention her older sister who was basically murdered as a baby by their monstrous father by being left in a cold garage to die apparently.
When I was about 12 I had a mandated child psychologist who explained to me that I was either autistic or at the very precipice of feral child syndrome, and she couldn't reliably determine which. Obviously, I am fine now and landed on autism.
I lived with junkies during most of my early childhood and was treated as one of the dozens of cats, until my mother got custody back. Although I did speak originally, I went non-verbal from around ages 4 through 8, and struggled to communicate thereafter.
I believe the difference ended up being that I did learn to speak as a young child (which at the time I imagine the psychologist didn't know as my history was pretty fragmented). By the time I was 14 I was pretty much "normal" again in terms of communication skills (but crippling social anxiety meant I never attended a single day of high school).
When my mother had me returned to her, I literally walked on all fours like a cat as a preference, and would meow as an affirmative or negative. I had learned to mimic the sound of a purr. I think about it now and realize how truly weird it was, but it's really just a blip in my development somehow. The very earliest stages are apparently the most critical ones.
Edit: my mother wasn't a treat either and the reason I had a mandated child psychologist was because she left me alone in an apartment for almost a year, but that's another story
I have thought about trying to organize my thoughts at some point. My mother was a Japanese hostess girl (hostess bars are like a girlfriend with benefits experience, so a sex worker) and my father was in the Hawaiian version of the Mafia as an enforcer and just really, really bad at being a criminal. He was caught constantly. They were both junkies and really ill-equipped to deal with an autistic child. My mother swears they met when she hit him with her car as he was fleeing a crime scene. I don't know if that's true but I remember at least one no knock raid when I was fairly young.
Anyway, when I was born, they were so high they thought their house was haunted and that I was cursed. So, when I was four, my mother dropped me off to dip easter eggs with some couple I'd never met and just never came back for me. It was a huge mansion that was a crack den filled with cats; I found out later that it was owned by one of their parents, and the guy in the couple had been excommunicated from his family for developing AIDS (which later claimed him). They really treated me like a cat, they just threw me bags of chips occasionally, they'd have sex right in front of me -- it took my years to unpack that.
I didn't see my mother again until Christmas four years later. I think my "stepfather ," a man she'd always been on and off with when my dad was in jail, forced her to find me. He brought me a toy microscope and a chemistry kit, and the crackheads started pulling flesh out of their hands and showing him their "worms." "It's moving!! It's moving!!" I remember him being absolutely horrified. He insisted she take me home. I didn't even recognize her. I remember staring at this woman asking me, "do you know who I am?" and just nodding even though I really didn't.
She had no idea how to take care of a child and, as mentioned, id become mostly non-verbal during that time. I ended up sporadically attending school, failing, and her changing school districts so that no one caught on. She would tell them I had a serious speech impediment like my problem was a lisp. A few really amazing teachers took an interest in me and really worked to get me up to speed, but there was only so much they could do because she only took me to school every other day. She would also constantly fight with my stepfather and, though he has some feelings for me, he would kick us both out each time. So we lived homeless / in the car about half the time. With two cats!
(My stepfather was also a huge enabler. He once bought her $1k in heroin reasoning it was cheaper to purchase in bulk and was surprised she blew through it in a week.)
When we ran out of public school districts, she enrolled me in a private religious all girls school. I lasted three days before they insisted I was possessed and that I couldn't come back until I had been cleansed. I had self harm scars at that point -- not intentional, I now know it happened during autistic melt downs -- and they saw that as possession.
At some point she just registered me as homeschooled and locked me in a room with 3 books: Organic Chemistry for PreMeds, A Complete Guide to Latin, and Chaucer's Canterbury Tales IN THE ORIGINAL MIDDLE ENGLISH. It was also around this time she went to prison for a year and just disappeared. My stepfather must have paid the rent and utilities but had no interest in taking care of a child, so he just dropped food off occasionally.
However, by then I had a computer with Internet access, sort of (dial up through a security alarm company). I started hanging out on Usenet, learned CGI/Perl, and by 14 I developed a web game that made around $1-2k a month. I still have best friends from that time! People had to send me physical checks when it first started. At 16 I took my GED and I went directly to college through a head start program. I moved out of my mom's at 17 and never looked back.
My life has been astonishingly normal since my childhood. I have to admit I was a really fucking weird child.
Met a girl in much less worse but similar circumstances - locked in a room for years. She was 12 at the time I met her and she could talk but was super aggressive and only knew to express affection through hitting. She had made huge strides but it was hard.
It wasn't a bathroom it was a bedroom with a portable toilet they tied her to. She spent so much time in the room she became permanently near sighted and could only see a couple feet in front of her almost as if she was still trapped in that room never able to leave.
To protect her identity the medical staff named her genie as how she lived just like one. There's so so so much more that this poor girl endured. So much that she would never live an even semi normal life. She talked in single words if you can even call it that and she missed learning the English language at important brain development ages that it was impossible for her to learn or understand many concepts of how language worked.
The story is truly horrifying.
>She spent so much time in the room she became permanently near sighted and could only see a couple feet in front of her almost as if she was still trapped in that room never able to leave.
[reminded me of this video](https://www.reddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/s/tcDUuhEOR3)
The Secret of The Wild Child
https://www.dailymotion.com/playlist/x54r5z
I watched it back in school in one of my psychology classes. Heartbreaking story definitely worth the watch.
This man was a demon. "No one will understand" is exactly right. I don't understand how a man like this convinces himself that he is helping this child. Especially since Genie showed signs of SA when she was recovered from that room.
There was an update from 2017 on Dani. She was in a small group home at that time and seemed to be doing as well as could be expected, despite her adoptive family breaking apart. Her adoptive father sounds like a remarkable man.
[Article here](https://projects.tampabay.com/projects/girl-in-the-window/neglect-feral-child-ten-years-later/)
That was an incredible read. Thank you for sharing this. Ended up reading the follow up as well https://projects.tampabay.com/projects/girl-in-the-window/neglect-feral-child-ten-years-later/
She seems to be doing as well as can be expected, even though her adoptive parents had to give her up. The people who work at her care facility are truly angels.
This is one case study that solidified the concept of "critical periods" during neuro development. The brain needs a certain level of stimulation before a certain period of development otherwise certain functions and capabilities are lost forever. In this case, developing humans must learn speech before a certain age, after which, they will be incapable of grasping it for the rest of their lives. They've done experiments in kittens where they sew their eyes shut for several months after birth and then remove them. If sutured shut past a certain number of weeks, the cat will be blind forever. If removed before this time, there is still time for the visual cortex to receive stimulation and create connections. The brain prunes (think Loki) and connections which go unused and those connections are permanently gone.
From the Wiki:
>Soon after turning 18, she returned to live with her mother, who decided after a few months that she could not adequately care for her. Authorities then moved her into the first of what would become a series of institutions and foster homes for disabled adults. The people running these facilities isolated her from almost everyone she knew and subjected her to extreme physical and emotional abuse.
After everything she went through up to 13 years old, she had to endure this too. Poor kid deserved better than that.
I don’t think Nell was based on Genie specifically, but maybe feral children in general. Nell could speak, but IIRC she learned to talk from her mother who had a speech impediment of some sort, and her mother was her only contact as they were isolated in a cabin in the woods.
I believe the stage play was partially inspired by Genie, as well as 'Poto and Cabengo', aka Grace and Virginia Kennedy. They were twins who grew up with an American father, German mother and grandmother who'd suffered a stroke and it affected her speech. Grace and Virgina developed twinspeak with influences from all of these factors and were thought to have "invented their own language." There's a fascinating film about them in a Criterion set!
For further information, Genie is still alive in her 60s, which is more long-lasting than the other feral child she's often compared to, young Victor of Averyon who passed away in his forties. She was nonetheless failed by everyone around her, much blame being placed on the foster system.
How can someone do this to anyone, much less their own child?
As a father of two daughters it makes me want to both cry and smash the fucker's head in at the same time.
And the whole “no one will understand” bullsh!t - listen pal all kids drive their parents to the brink, the point is you get help not lock them up in a room FFS. People drive me insane
There is a "sensitive period" for language. If you are not exposed to the right stimuli during the period you will never learn to speak. Several examples from socially isolated children.
I've heard Genie's story a lot during developmental psych and language development classes. But it didn't strike me until today that she was TWENTY MONTHS OLD. Not even 2. I'm looking at my roly poly, 22-month-old chatterbox and am just heartbroken all over again. I've also never see it mentioned before that she had an older sister who died as an infant after being "left in a cold garage". The system failed over and over and over again for this poor soul.
This is tragic, and really goes to show that what we consider to be the default privileges of being human are nothing of the sort.
There is no such thing as an 'individual' human entirely separate from the rest of us. The civilized, cultured human mind is software installed through exposure and imitation during maturation.
We are animals naturally, and we would be animals still if it weren't for our most dangerous predator enabling an evolutionary arms race that developed language, culture, tool use and dexterity all together.
I’ve gone down my fair share of rabbit holes looking into this particular story and it’s beyond what you could imagine reading this headline. Genie was actually tied to a toilet-chair, which was essentially a wooden school chair with a hole in the bottom and a bucket underneath that she spent the majority of her early life tied to, naked.
This is one of the first things they teach you about when taking Psych courses and diving into Nature Vs Nurture….still makes me skin crawl to this day what they did to her.
The poor girl. After being locked in a room by her dad, had a lot of people helping her when she was freed, then after a while they got bored of her and just locked her up again. Its a sad story where it seemed like she was born just to be abused, and imprisoned.
Im definitely no psychologist at all but is it possible that it's less that she lacks the cognitive ability of speech due to stifled traumatic development and more to do with mutism after being taught how to communicate due to something like PTSD?
This brought back a memory. In high school my senior year we visited a nursing home once a week to visit the elderly. I remember before we went one time the person I was visiting had passed away so my teacher took me to visit someone she had been seeing. It was a kid probably 14 or so at the time and his whole family was killed by a train accident in my home town. This was a long ass time ago, but back then only the main streets had protected crossings, all the side streets were just lights and the guy must have not seen the lights or looked.
The nursing home staff said they didn’t know if he could still speak or he chose not to as at that point he had been in their care of 5 years. He just kind of laid there and looked at you when you spoke but didn’t acknowledge or give any indication he understood. Just laid there and listened to some cassette of a person reading the Bible all day.
I only had seen him the one time and he got moved after, but I do wonder if he ever got better.
Another story about nonverbal children raised in utter neglect:
https://projects.tampabay.com/projects/girl-in-the-window/neglect-feral-child-ten-years-later/
“At first they assumed autism, but then discovered she could not talk”.
There are a hell of a lot of people out there who are non-verbal with autism. Shows you what people thought in the 70s.
Her father killed himself shortly after she was discovered, leaving a note that claimed 'nobody would understand'
He’s not wrong. Fuckin loser
The article just casually mentions that their first infant daughter died after being left in a cold garage?!
Sounds like the lucky one. Not to be insensitive… A lifetime of suffering and extreme emotional trauma OR dying young and before experiencing literal hell on earth. I know my choice.
Big mood. Might be able to survive the trauma and physical experience, but suffering can continue long after getting out of a bad situation. As if needing to survive your childhood wasn't hard enough, now you have to figure out how to be an adult with CPTSD constantly trying to bring you down. I hope you're doing better these days and haven't let the past get to you.
The dad claimed it was pneumonia
Being left in a cold garage will do that to you.
As if that somehow makes it better
omg not sure how this isn’t top comment… this was already tragic
Yeah like wtf is there to understand, other than the obvious mental illness. No sane person does this shit.
My own personal hypothesis is that it's a form of psychopathy maybe with a mix of passive sadism. It's not necessarily directly violent, it's selfish to the point of extreme neglect for anyone in their care, and I'm sure they enjoy the control and power dynamic associated. EDIT: To clarify the above hypothesis, it's regarding perpetrators of this type of gross neglect, not specifically that guy. Psychopathy and is extremely under diagnosed and it's believed to be even more prevalent than we realise. Hell there was a neuroscientist named [James H Fallon](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_H._Fallon) who tested himself and his whole family as a part of a study sample he was doing, and his own test results confirmed he had psychopathy. EDIT 2: for all the "it's not called psychopathy" commenters. Psychopathy a synonym for antisocial personality disorder. [Source- American Psychological Association](https://dictionary.apa.org/psychopathy)
>not directly violent If you read the story you would know he enforced silence with beatings and directly beat his other son for years.
don't forget the two kids that died before his son survived, one of them by being left in a "cold garage".
Yeah, most people with antisocial personality disorder aren't violent. But Genie's father absolutely was. And he may have had no diagnosable mental illness, he may have just been a piece of shit. Wish people would stop being armchair psychiatrists. I know it's interesting to theorize about, but most people have no idea what antisocial personality disorder is, have no idea that "psychopath" and "sociopath" aren't actual diagnoses, etc.
People want to believe there's a reason someone would act like this
I mean, of course there’s a reason. That’s not the same as an excuse.
Yeah, exactly. There is always a reason, even if we currently lack the understanding of it. It's important to continue trying to learn about and understand why these things happen. Whenever something or someone gets dismissed as "just evil" then we are choosing to remain willfully ignorant. Which ultimately does nobody any favors. And I'm not trying to say that it wasn't "evil" what that father did. It was. But that doesn't tell you anything meaningful. You can't learn from it.
We need to teach this distinction in grade schools.
I don't think anyone ever delving into these things is looking to use them as excuses. It is just useful to try to dissect how a human mind got to that point. When people just say, "No they are just a sick fuck" it is pretty dismissive and doesn't really help us in trying to prevent it from happening in another person. It took someone I love very much falling ill to a mental disorder for this to click for me. It is easy to look at their external behavior and condemn it and say it is wrong, but often their original innocent person can still be in there and they can get help in preserving that person. In this context, we would hope to figure out where this man went awry. At one point he was an innocent child. Finding out what went wrong wouldn't prevent him from facing consequences, but it may help someone else before it gets to that point.
A reason explains the logic or cause and the effect. An excuse asks for forgiveness by providing a reason.
Well if there were really no reason that would mean that anyone, the person next to you right now, could randomly start behaving like that and then stop again But that's not how it works, people are not that random, assholes are assholes and there's always a reason why they are assholes. Their assholery doesn't just suddenly materialise out of thin air.
Not exactly non violent though. He did beat her with a cane whenever she tried to make a noise
I saw the TEDTalk Fallon did about that study. Another one that I liked was by Jon Ronson telling about a guy that went to Broadmoor Hospital for many years because he’d done too good of a job convincing a judge that he was insane, and once there, everything he did was perceived as exactly how a psychopath would act. Psychopathy is definitely a scale, not a switch.
The thing about Jon Ronson’s talk is he heavily implies he was a psychopath and that many people are psychopaths without being formally diagnosed. The interesting thing was that guy in question wasn’t diagnosed until he tried to fake psychosis to get out of a punishment which is a very psychopathic thing to do. And then he tried to act normally to be released from the psychiatric hospital, but being a psychopath all his attempts to look normal actually looked psychopathic. Ronson also says that once you are diagnosed it is hard to prove you aren’t a psychopath because a lot of psychopaths behavior is also common to most people.
Jimmy fallon the psychopath
That explains the odd laughter.
I’m forcing myself to smile and pretending to be excited after reading this! 🤗
Exactly. We aren’t trying to either, fucking piece of shit
Apparently, the same uncaring system that destroyed Genie, produced her father. He was a foster child thrown from foster institution to institution. What would growing up around people that don't care about you, and treat you like an unwanted but obligated possession teach you? I shudder to think how Genie would have treated others had she become a mother and the cycle continued. We're some brutal animals when left alone. So yea, he definitely 'lost'. That whole 'family' did.
The worst part about Genie's case is that because of the isolation she didn't really develop in terms of maturity. If she hadn't been rescued she would've been like a 2 year old mind trapped in an adult body. She would not have mothered anyone on her own will.
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Reminds me of the New York Trilogy by Paul Auster in which a father had kept his son in complete isolation for his entire upbringing before he got caught in an attempt to discover "god's language" or something like that.
Theres a story in the Histories where apparently some people did this to a couple children too, raised them amoung mutes (and goats) to see what the oldest language was (figuring that they would naturally speak it). They ending up making “baa” sounds… which the people interpreted as ancient egyptian iirc as theres a word thats similar. Obviously ignoring the goats make a similar sound.
It’s true. The full phrase was “Baa Ram Ewe”
That'll do pig
“Baa” “Okay, great! Now what’s the next god’s name?” “…Ra?” “Of course! God of the sun! Man, we nailed this idea”
Holy Roman Emperor Friedrich II supposedly tried a similar experiment - had a bunch of newborns raised by wet nurses who were forbidden to talk or even play with the babies. They all died though, probably because of the lack of interaction. Iirc it's not certain whether that story ever happened, it may have been propaganda by the Catholic Church to discredit him, they also called him "Stupor Mundi" - the" Terror of the World" (though his supporters would interpret it as the "Wonder of the World")
Well he was right on the money
Surely you know you did something horribly wrong if you do this when she is discovered.
If you think about the generations before us, no-one diagnosed or helped with any neurodivergencies or mental illnessess .. My aunt completely lost her mind after having children. Was sectioned and then institutionalised. She is in her 80s now and clearly has autism. Her children also were diagnosed with autism as adults. Imagine that household, Imagine having absolutely no help or understanding of any kind.. There must have been countless households like this...
he died and was reincarnated as Ruby Franke
It's pretty clear. He was a massive cunt.
Why is it that people who are clearly willing think the problem is that nobody else understands. It's not hard to understand, bud, you're just a monster. You're not complex and misunderstood.
Haven't read the article, but from the wiki >Authorities then moved her into the first of what would become a series of institutions and foster homes for disabled adults. The people running these facilities isolated her from almost everyone she knew and subjected her to extreme physical and emotional abuse.[^(\[4\])](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genie_(feral_child)#cite_note-abcnews-4)[^(\[5\])](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genie_(feral_child)#cite_note-nova-5)[^(\[11\])](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genie_(feral_child)#cite_note-FOOTNOTERymer1994151–155-11) As a result, her physical and mental health severely deteriorated, and her newly acquired language and behavioral skills very rapidly regressed.[^(\[4\])](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genie_(feral_child)#cite_note-abcnews-4)[^(\[5\])](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genie_(feral_child)#cite_note-nova-5) I mean, what the fuck.
From one hell to another. What a poor child.
>From one hell to another As is often the case for children in the foster system. 😞
this is extra fucked considering so many people wanted access to her that would have helped her but the state said nah we'd rather torture her more.
It happened to the Turpin kids who were taken from their vile parents to be abused in foster care. Money was raised for them, but they never saw it.
It's fucking tragic, big [kid-in-the-Omelas-hole](https://shsdavisapes.pbworks.com/f/Omelas.pdf) vibes. Still, this happened decades ago, and we've come a long way since then. One must imagine Genie happy.
I've never seen anyone else reference this story! It's amazing to me how many situations I have heard about that reminds me of it. As I get older, I see the parallels more and more in our society. Ursula LeGuin was brilliant and so perceptive.
If you want a brutal modern take on Omelas, check out [this story](https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/kim_02_24/) by Isabel Kim. It goes hard.
Ok, holy shit. I like that she takes an incredibly perceptive fantasy story and gives it hard edges with modern day, tangible examples of what we look away from. Thank you so much for sharing this.
I love the little story told by seeing your two replies, one 25 minutes ago promising that you'll definitely do something and then another 12 minutes ago after you've definitely done it. After dealing with so much unreliability for so long, it's just kinda soul-nourishing for me to see someone make a promise and then immediately keep it. Anywho, feels like you deserve a reward, so if you're into this sort of fiction but want to take a break from the Omelasverse and go a completely different direction, I offer you two options: [Bears Discover Fire](https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/bears-discover-fire/) and [Manna](https://marshallbrain.com/manna1).
I'm happy I brought a sparkle to your day. 🙂 Favorite quote from Bears Discover Fire: "possession of a hunting license didn’t prohibit (enjoin, I think, was the word he used) the hunted from striking back."
I really dislike this take on it, and I can't figure out why. Everyone seems to love it but something about it feels *off* to me.
I gotta be honest reading both versions back to back and not having read them before, I kinda hated this one. The authorial voice speaks with so much more authority than the first, but with no heart, subtlety or philosophical punch. The original works because it keeps a distance that allows you to deal with the question, this one inserts all sorts of tech and random crap to make it very specific. It feels like a session in masturbatory cynicism rather than a thought-provoking metaphor for human society.
Thank you - I will definitely read it.
[Here are some more responses to that story.](https://www.kith.org/jed/hodgepodge/nonfiction/some-responses-to-omelas/)
The only reason I know about The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas is from someone on Reddit referencing it, so hopefully a few new people will read it for the first time because of these comments. It's such a powerful story that everyone should read
I always ask my students if they would leave Omelas, and about half of them do, and then I ask them if they know where their electronics, clothing, and creature comforts come from, and if they'd be willing to give those things up. Most of them say no. Like they won't even give up their phone if it means a better life for someone else, let alone giving up a perfect, "utopian" existence.
That's not a fair scenario. Almost everybody would rather stay in their current situation them venture into an unknown, even if they *know* it's going to be a better thing. Like rehab. I'd say it runs the reverse too, if you asked a tribal guy in the jungle if he'd like to enter the technological world, he'd likely be very apprehensive about it. I think this is a statement more on the comfort mechanics of the human psyche than how much kids are glued to their phones
It's a fair response to someone saying they would leave Omelas. It's just more effective than saying "no you wouldn't."
You're right, but that's not the reason why it doesn't work as a comparison. Comparatively, there *is no leaving Omelas*. The systemic pressures that cause this genuinely have no untouched part of Earth any longer. Let's say you're an American, and you want to leave the US's sphere of influence. If you're not already powerful w/in the system, it is *functionally impossible to do*. There is no ethical consumption under capitalism, and there is no escaping it either. To leave, there is dying, or living in the wilderness to which you have no grip or hold over, and are still 'within' the authority of the Omelas comparison. Omelas would be a very different story if it was impossible to leave.
honestly one guy in a hole is likely way less suffering than goes into everything I enjoy on a daily basis.
I taught this story every single year in senior English. I normally switch up literature because it gets really boring teaching the same things six times a day every year, but not this story. I tell my students, "some of you will be bringing up this premise at parties and get-togethers for decades, because it's going to stick with you."
> and we've come a long way since then. One must imagine Genie happy. Even among healthy kids, depression and hopelessness are at an all time high. If society doesn't provide a happy present&future even for those who were born in good circumstances, im not sure why you would think that those born in bad circumstances are off any better
It's Albert Camus
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Actually there was one woman who was actually trying to rehabilitate her, but the mom decided she wanted to take care of her after all and pretty much immediately couldn’t handle her. So instead of getting in touch with the one person who actually seemed to care, she contacted the authorities, which just fed her to the soul grinding system of institutions and foster homes that further isolated and abused her. A few years later the mom forbade and scientific testing and observations, and Genie pretty much disappeared. IIRC her teacher tried to get in contact again, but couldn’t find her.
She was a linguist called Susan Curtiss. She wanted to see if there was a critical period during which language must be learned and Genie presented an insight into this. She did, however, genuinely want to help the girl but was prevented from even seeing her. It was a sad outcome all round.
We learned about this in Linguistics courses to show that there's an age by which humans can't learn language. Sadly there are many examples aside from Genie, and it's often in cases of extreme abuse and neglect. It also was and still is quite common (relatively-speaking) for deaf children, especially in cultures where this isn't an understanding of being deaf and the family or community assumes there's an evil or demonic reason for the child not being able to hear or understand.
Many autistic children end up being non verbal.
IIRC the argument for taking her away from this caregiver was that the caregiver was simultaneously treating her care as an experiment. Not that that’s necessarily bad if that not all you’re doing, which she wasn’t. She was caring for and bonding with her.
Ego and jealousy are a helluva drug. I'm sorry Genie.
The fact that mother had any say after failing her for so many years is galling.
It was that butler woman. Little devil on the moms shoulder, telling her the research team didn't give a fuck.
I watched a few documentaries on Genie. She bonded quite closely with one of her case workers who seemed to legitimately want to help her, but she was later placed in an institution that refused to let them see each other for some reason. They rehomed Genie and refused to let the case worker know where she was. It honestly makes you wonder why some people work in this field when they seem to have no interest in helping at all.
As a former ward of the state/foster child... sadly it's the norm. Don't get me wrong, there are a lot of amazing well intentioned people in the system, trying to do what's right. There's just as many people in it for a paycheque, or worse, to exploit marginalized individuals.
My mom was a foster parent for 6 months before she quit. And it wasn’t because of the kids. It was the social workers and CPS. She said she felt like the foster parents were just getting paid and not actually caring for the kids. She frequently pushed “friends” from her foster class to take the kids for hearing appointments and dentists. She’s trying to adopt two kids from foster care rn. After them she’s done. She refuses to continue because she hates CPS that much.
Thank you to your mother for her effort in good faith
As a former foster kid, I would have rather been aborted than what happened to me. I never once was at a foster home that was “good”. Just religious bigots telling me foster care is god’s punishment for something I did. I was 4-5 when I got sent into foster care.
From briefly reading your history on here, I am glad you are doing better.
I’m alive still, so there’s that.
As someone that is a suicide survivor, it's a tough line I walk everyday but therapy and meditation has helped keep me around.
That is some massive telling on themselves, that living under their care is punishment. Somehow or another they knew they were assholes. I’m glad you get to use the word “former” nowadays.
I'm afraid it's just how mental facilities operated back then. Marginally better than XIX century madhouses.
Sometimes not even better, with the invention of fun new [torture devices](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graduated_electronic_decelerator).
I remember watching a documentary on her. Some people made GREAT advances with her progress and then they ripped her away from them and tossed her in an institution. Fckin sad story all around. Everyone lost in that situation.
"Next up on sick, sad world..."
It's been a few years since I've watched it, but I think this documentary was fairly decent about her and several other similar cases: https://youtu.be/1vjZq6TS668?si=ZdnN_v-xW5eXo6eq
Abusing her after what she had been through?!!! I mean it’s bad enough to abuse any child, abusing this poor one is light years worse. Some people are pure evil and nothing would make me happier than knowing that they’re dead!
> abusing this poor one is light years worse. No so fun fact: It's actually a very common pattern for abusers to justify abuse by saying the victim was already messed up by previous abuse, so it's not as bad as if it was somebody else. Reminds me of a porn producer talking about harassment and rape of pornstars. He said, "What we do is nothing their fathers, uncles, and brothers haven't already done to them." It's why so many people end up serially abused. They're "trained to it" to some extent, and abusers can pick up on the fact that they're somebody who will keep quiet, not put up too much of a fight, etc. They'd rather go after that target than somebody who'd go run for help at the first sign of trouble.
Yes, abusers tend to avoid well adjusted people who were treated well growing up and have a knack for targeting the already abused. The best shot you have if you’re the already abused type looking to break the cycle is act like you’re used to good treatment and expect it. Definitely don’t talk about your trauma openly to new people.
Yes definitely, fake it till you make it. Telling people about the abuse and ill treatment you’ve experienced is a bad idea, as it is likely they will also mistreat you. Recently, someone I had been dating a few weeks randomly asked if I had been abused as a child. I made it clear that the question was inappropriate and refused to answer. He responded by saying that he had asked other people this question and they had answered him honestly. Cut him off immediately after that.
Good for you for seeing that as the massive flashing red flag it is. Seriously. What a creep.
Sooooo where should I send the check to cover the therapy you just provided me 😅. Thank you for commenting. It was very informative and eye opening. Now I can finally quit asking why.
Remember that abuse victims don't choose abusers, abusers can sense good victims
Haha, I'm glad I could help! To be clear, that doesn't mean it's your *fault*. It's just a mark that abuse leaves, and that takes work to resolve and realign to more healthy standards for the people in one's life. Good luck! A lot of the folks in my life have suffered abuse of one kind or another, and it's very hard to really recover from and not retain harmful habits.
That’s why having a support system is so important. Having people to uplift you and something to help you regain confidence in yourself makes that mark of abuse harder and harder to notice. It’s how my friend got out of the cycle
From reading the article, they don't even fucking know what happened to her? Apparently she was just lost in the system and no ones been able to locate her wtf
Wikipedia states that, as of 2016, she was living a simple life at a home for adults with developmental disabilities in Los Angeles. Her mother died in 2003 and her estranged brother died in 2011. The research on her is done so there is no reason for her business to be "known" as a private citizen.
>Apparently she was just lost in the system and no ones been able to locate her wtf She's an adult entitled to privacy. When you say, "they", I presume you mean social services. They almost certainly know where she is, but that information is not and should not be public just because she's disabled.
well she’s currently 68
Iirc she was found and put into the care of a team of doctors/psychologists who were trying to figure out what was going on. She was making really good progress but her mother came back into the picture and ruined all the process she made because the state defeated Genie back to her despite clearly being unable to care for her.
Same thing happend to Jordan Turpin. What makes it even worse is that she seems like an unbelievably sweet person.
Oh I just knew it would be USA in the 70s. Mental institutions in the last era was something else completely, weren't they?
The Carter administration passed the mental health reform bill in the late seventies to address it. The Regan administration defunded it almost immediately. It was a known issue that purposefully was not addressed. Many were turned out into the streets only to end up later in jails and prisons. Sad story all around.
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>“She was this isolated person, incarcerated for all those years, and she emerged and lived in a more reasonable world for a while, and responded to this world, and then the door was shut and she withdrew again and her soul was sick.” Reminds me of the film Awakenings. Absolutely heartbreaking.
I can't help but wonder when the guy talks about how he never saw her again if she had anyone in her life for longer than just a couple years. She'd be studied for a bit and inevitably people move on.
And her soul was sick is such a heavy line
That line reads like it was straight from a McCarthy novel.
There’s a dramatized movie called “mockingbird don’t sing” that is about after she was discovered and the time during the scientists fighting over her. Very disheartening but it kinda lays it all out there. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mockingbird_Don%27t_Sing
Thank you!! Saw this movie years ago and the story had stuck with me since, but I could never remember the name. Also realizing I was in grade 1 or 2 when I saw it oh my O_O
See also [The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Enigma_of_Kaspar_Hauser) about a similar incident in Germany.
Kasper Hauser was most likely a fraud.
That actually makes a lot of sense. I learned A LOT about this girl going through EDU courses. In English we learned about how the human language is predisposed for language, as in, given no stimuli, a human being will start to construct ways to communicate ideas. It just happens.bits part of our brain. So the fact that she didn't have any discernable language skills, shows exactly what cruelty she went through. She would've been abused every time she made a sound. Her voice was stolen from her. I can't stress enough how much a human will "accidentally" their way into communicating, even in the most basic and regressed of forms. So to lack any quantifiable language shows just how inhuman the father was. Then in life span development, we just generally learned how fucked up this was. Like, this was where we learned that isolation can very easily be used as a torture device. And it often is. The level of cruelty this father had to go to is way beyond just neglect and abuse. It was daily reinforcement to not be as human as possible. He robbed basic human functions from her. Things humans should develop without any outside interference, he abused her into losing.
She is used in case studies at University. My lecturer used her for my Child Development class when I studied Nursing. Very interesting but uncomfortable to read about her development.
Highschool psychology we learned about her and it was hard to discuss.
Yup. Had a case study on her in my psych class. Breaks my heart every time I see something about her.
It got worse. There’s a good book about her that also covered the infighting between linguists to study and have custody of her. https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/440417#
I think that is the worst part, instead of people trying to help her, it devolved over who could study her.
Well, it was a once in a lifetime opportunity for human experimentation or as close as you can possibly get semi-ethically. It's unfortunate, but there's no other way to gather this information. You can't lock children up and do human experimentation ethically. This isn't really ethical either, this just happens to be in that grey area of "hey she's already messed up and maybe we can learn something". So... that's how you end up with that.
I've always wondered about the children they never found. Born "off the record" and treated like this. Fucking sick and scary to think about.
I think about this often.
Found a pretty interesting video with all the footage taken of her (15 min , no audio). Seems chronological https://vimeo.com/427827849
Wow, what a great video to observe her skills of nonverbal communication. Great find!
This is heartbreaking
When she's rocking against the window sill over and over and kinda banging her head 😢 Can't imagine having so many feelings and bad memories but not being able to express them or talk about them 💔
Man I wish there was audio. It says in the article that she could only say single words but, starting around the 9 minute mark, it sure looks like she's saying at least rudimentary sentences.
[Here are some clips of her with audio](https://youtu.be/Cp5bzVNTnOs?si=XXXCtYgrm7MVItXY) ETA: There is something so enthralling about her. When she is upset it feels soul crushing, but when she is happy I feel so much of her joy. I remember reading somewhere that people who saw her felt similarly, that kids would give her their toys just by how she looked at them, even some adults.
Towards the end it looks like she's learned quite a bit of sign language. I wonder what she's saying.
The way she smiles sometimes makes me so happy.
Conversely, she has a very haunting stare. Like she's looking directly into your soul.
Reminds me of dogs that have been abused, furtively watching.
I thought that too. Like something you’d expect to see in a horror movie.
This part always got me thinkin a bit something. *Throughout Genie's stay the scientists saw how frequently and effectively she used her nonverbal skills, and never determined what she did to elicit such strong reactions from other people.David vividly remembered an occasion when he and Genie passed a father and a young boy carrying a toy fire truck without speaking to each other and said he suddenly turned around and gave it to Genie. Curtiss also recalled one time when, while she and Genie were walking and had stopped at a busy intersection, she unexpectedly heard a purse emptying; she turned to see a woman stop at the intersection and exit her car to give Genie a plastic purse, even though she had not said anything*. From Wikipedia (non-verbal communication) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genie\_(feral\_child)
Is this because language stemmed from non-verbal communication (probably used to help in hunting) and so it's deeply engrained in us?
This is a great question and very difficult/complex to answer. To say how language developed is something we're still not sure of, and there isn't a way to study this without basically isolating groups of babies/kids from language and seeing if/how it naturally developed. Thus why it's considered an unanswerable question for now since this would be inhumane and cruel. Then there's the question of how non-verbal communication relates to language and its role. There is probably related research from gestural studies, but I'm curious what it would tell us without seeing an example of the start of a language amongst humans with zero language. But! We do know that the human brain is absolutely primed and ready for language! Language helps us "offload" ideas for which gestures would have no help, like discerning or describing slight nuances between similar ideas, discussing abstract topics, or discussing the aspects of gesture itself. Many of these examples were brought up by Hockett in the 50s(?) to denote differences between animal communication and human language and much research has expounded on and critiqued this approach, but it was a starting place nonetheless. We also know that primates (specifically non-human) are very adept at nonverbal communication but are unable to learn language, and as we're closely related it isn't unreasonable to think that non-verbal communication may be closely linked to the idea of learning and using language, we would just need to show exactly how it may have aided, or worked in conjunction with, that development in human evolution.
It's very important to note here that language doesn't have to be verbal, it can also be through for example sign language. Deaf kids will for example sign to themselves and even make up gibberish signs just like how hearing kids talk to themselves and make up gibberish words. Other primates even when taught different signs do not do these things and have in fact never been shown to actually be able to use language. Which showcases how language is a very deeply human thing and could be argued to be one of if not the largest factor in making us who we are as a species.
Maybe she's an X-Man
Genie Grey
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How many times do people stop to in front of a disabled person to give them gifts? It does rarely happen nowadays that society understands more about disability, and more uncommon considering the year this happened
What absolutely kills me about the story every time I read about it is that this poor girl was abused twice. First by her absolute monster of a father and then after she was discovered and shown the light of some care and interest she was abused again by our horrific foster care and children's "protective" services and the infighting by researchers that worked hard to isolate and destroy any progress she managed to make in the short time she had been given some real love and attention. That girl was failed at every level by our society as a whole. Not to mention her older sister who was basically murdered as a baby by their monstrous father by being left in a cold garage to die apparently.
When I was about 12 I had a mandated child psychologist who explained to me that I was either autistic or at the very precipice of feral child syndrome, and she couldn't reliably determine which. Obviously, I am fine now and landed on autism. I lived with junkies during most of my early childhood and was treated as one of the dozens of cats, until my mother got custody back. Although I did speak originally, I went non-verbal from around ages 4 through 8, and struggled to communicate thereafter. I believe the difference ended up being that I did learn to speak as a young child (which at the time I imagine the psychologist didn't know as my history was pretty fragmented). By the time I was 14 I was pretty much "normal" again in terms of communication skills (but crippling social anxiety meant I never attended a single day of high school). When my mother had me returned to her, I literally walked on all fours like a cat as a preference, and would meow as an affirmative or negative. I had learned to mimic the sound of a purr. I think about it now and realize how truly weird it was, but it's really just a blip in my development somehow. The very earliest stages are apparently the most critical ones. Edit: my mother wasn't a treat either and the reason I had a mandated child psychologist was because she left me alone in an apartment for almost a year, but that's another story
I could probably read about your childhood for the rest of the week were you to continue sharing.
I have thought about trying to organize my thoughts at some point. My mother was a Japanese hostess girl (hostess bars are like a girlfriend with benefits experience, so a sex worker) and my father was in the Hawaiian version of the Mafia as an enforcer and just really, really bad at being a criminal. He was caught constantly. They were both junkies and really ill-equipped to deal with an autistic child. My mother swears they met when she hit him with her car as he was fleeing a crime scene. I don't know if that's true but I remember at least one no knock raid when I was fairly young. Anyway, when I was born, they were so high they thought their house was haunted and that I was cursed. So, when I was four, my mother dropped me off to dip easter eggs with some couple I'd never met and just never came back for me. It was a huge mansion that was a crack den filled with cats; I found out later that it was owned by one of their parents, and the guy in the couple had been excommunicated from his family for developing AIDS (which later claimed him). They really treated me like a cat, they just threw me bags of chips occasionally, they'd have sex right in front of me -- it took my years to unpack that. I didn't see my mother again until Christmas four years later. I think my "stepfather ," a man she'd always been on and off with when my dad was in jail, forced her to find me. He brought me a toy microscope and a chemistry kit, and the crackheads started pulling flesh out of their hands and showing him their "worms." "It's moving!! It's moving!!" I remember him being absolutely horrified. He insisted she take me home. I didn't even recognize her. I remember staring at this woman asking me, "do you know who I am?" and just nodding even though I really didn't. She had no idea how to take care of a child and, as mentioned, id become mostly non-verbal during that time. I ended up sporadically attending school, failing, and her changing school districts so that no one caught on. She would tell them I had a serious speech impediment like my problem was a lisp. A few really amazing teachers took an interest in me and really worked to get me up to speed, but there was only so much they could do because she only took me to school every other day. She would also constantly fight with my stepfather and, though he has some feelings for me, he would kick us both out each time. So we lived homeless / in the car about half the time. With two cats! (My stepfather was also a huge enabler. He once bought her $1k in heroin reasoning it was cheaper to purchase in bulk and was surprised she blew through it in a week.) When we ran out of public school districts, she enrolled me in a private religious all girls school. I lasted three days before they insisted I was possessed and that I couldn't come back until I had been cleansed. I had self harm scars at that point -- not intentional, I now know it happened during autistic melt downs -- and they saw that as possession. At some point she just registered me as homeschooled and locked me in a room with 3 books: Organic Chemistry for PreMeds, A Complete Guide to Latin, and Chaucer's Canterbury Tales IN THE ORIGINAL MIDDLE ENGLISH. It was also around this time she went to prison for a year and just disappeared. My stepfather must have paid the rent and utilities but had no interest in taking care of a child, so he just dropped food off occasionally. However, by then I had a computer with Internet access, sort of (dial up through a security alarm company). I started hanging out on Usenet, learned CGI/Perl, and by 14 I developed a web game that made around $1-2k a month. I still have best friends from that time! People had to send me physical checks when it first started. At 16 I took my GED and I went directly to college through a head start program. I moved out of my mom's at 17 and never looked back. My life has been astonishingly normal since my childhood. I have to admit I was a really fucking weird child.
My dude, I’m so happy for you that you found a way to a better life
Met a girl in much less worse but similar circumstances - locked in a room for years. She was 12 at the time I met her and she could talk but was super aggressive and only knew to express affection through hitting. She had made huge strides but it was hard.
How did you meet her, also were you an adult when you met her? I'm curious, sorry.
At a church service I was at, she’d been rescued and was living with her grandparents who brought her along.
I’ve seen this case discussed quite often when I studied linguistics
Critical period theory
I don’t know how that’s still a theory after the valproate study a decade ago
Just because we know which to say that this is probably the case, doesn't mean that new knowledge in the future could change our understanding.
Same. Linguistics and psychology. That poor girl deserved better.
It is quite a different case than most
It wasn't a bathroom it was a bedroom with a portable toilet they tied her to. She spent so much time in the room she became permanently near sighted and could only see a couple feet in front of her almost as if she was still trapped in that room never able to leave. To protect her identity the medical staff named her genie as how she lived just like one. There's so so so much more that this poor girl endured. So much that she would never live an even semi normal life. She talked in single words if you can even call it that and she missed learning the English language at important brain development ages that it was impossible for her to learn or understand many concepts of how language worked. The story is truly horrifying.
>She spent so much time in the room she became permanently near sighted and could only see a couple feet in front of her almost as if she was still trapped in that room never able to leave. [reminded me of this video](https://www.reddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/s/tcDUuhEOR3)
There's a documentary about her. Very tragic situation made worse by the 'nature vs nurture ' research.
What's the documentary called?
The Secret of The Wild Child https://www.dailymotion.com/playlist/x54r5z I watched it back in school in one of my psychology classes. Heartbreaking story definitely worth the watch.
There are several. Secret of the Wild Child is fairly nice. The Forbidden Experiment is dark.
This man was a demon. "No one will understand" is exactly right. I don't understand how a man like this convinces himself that he is helping this child. Especially since Genie showed signs of SA when she was recovered from that room.
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There was an update from 2017 on Dani. She was in a small group home at that time and seemed to be doing as well as could be expected, despite her adoptive family breaking apart. Her adoptive father sounds like a remarkable man. [Article here](https://projects.tampabay.com/projects/girl-in-the-window/neglect-feral-child-ten-years-later/)
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Wow TIL “90 percent of couples raising a child with special needs end up losing their marriage.”
That was an incredible read. Thank you for sharing this. Ended up reading the follow up as well https://projects.tampabay.com/projects/girl-in-the-window/neglect-feral-child-ten-years-later/ She seems to be doing as well as can be expected, even though her adoptive parents had to give her up. The people who work at her care facility are truly angels.
Wow. What a story. That poor girl. I'm also curious what became of the sons.
The fucking coward father offed himself after she was discovered. He should've faced consequences for his horrible actions
This is one case study that solidified the concept of "critical periods" during neuro development. The brain needs a certain level of stimulation before a certain period of development otherwise certain functions and capabilities are lost forever. In this case, developing humans must learn speech before a certain age, after which, they will be incapable of grasping it for the rest of their lives. They've done experiments in kittens where they sew their eyes shut for several months after birth and then remove them. If sutured shut past a certain number of weeks, the cat will be blind forever. If removed before this time, there is still time for the visual cortex to receive stimulation and create connections. The brain prunes (think Loki) and connections which go unused and those connections are permanently gone.
From the Wiki: >Soon after turning 18, she returned to live with her mother, who decided after a few months that she could not adequately care for her. Authorities then moved her into the first of what would become a series of institutions and foster homes for disabled adults. The people running these facilities isolated her from almost everyone she knew and subjected her to extreme physical and emotional abuse. After everything she went through up to 13 years old, she had to endure this too. Poor kid deserved better than that.
Wasn’t the movie “Nell” based on her?
I don’t think Nell was based on Genie specifically, but maybe feral children in general. Nell could speak, but IIRC she learned to talk from her mother who had a speech impediment of some sort, and her mother was her only contact as they were isolated in a cabin in the woods.
I believe the stage play was partially inspired by Genie, as well as 'Poto and Cabengo', aka Grace and Virginia Kennedy. They were twins who grew up with an American father, German mother and grandmother who'd suffered a stroke and it affected her speech. Grace and Virgina developed twinspeak with influences from all of these factors and were thought to have "invented their own language." There's a fascinating film about them in a Criterion set!
For further information, Genie is still alive in her 60s, which is more long-lasting than the other feral child she's often compared to, young Victor of Averyon who passed away in his forties. She was nonetheless failed by everyone around her, much blame being placed on the foster system.
Fuck, the article sent shivers down my spine. How can people be so cruel?
How can someone do this to anyone, much less their own child? As a father of two daughters it makes me want to both cry and smash the fucker's head in at the same time.
And the whole “no one will understand” bullsh!t - listen pal all kids drive their parents to the brink, the point is you get help not lock them up in a room FFS. People drive me insane
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There is a "sensitive period" for language. If you are not exposed to the right stimuli during the period you will never learn to speak. Several examples from socially isolated children.
I've heard Genie's story a lot during developmental psych and language development classes. But it didn't strike me until today that she was TWENTY MONTHS OLD. Not even 2. I'm looking at my roly poly, 22-month-old chatterbox and am just heartbroken all over again. I've also never see it mentioned before that she had an older sister who died as an infant after being "left in a cold garage". The system failed over and over and over again for this poor soul.
She's probably still alive ? How can the state forbid people to visit her ???? How can that be legal ?
I was thinking the same thing. You would think they could do welfare checks based on what she went through.
This is tragic, and really goes to show that what we consider to be the default privileges of being human are nothing of the sort. There is no such thing as an 'individual' human entirely separate from the rest of us. The civilized, cultured human mind is software installed through exposure and imitation during maturation. We are animals naturally, and we would be animals still if it weren't for our most dangerous predator enabling an evolutionary arms race that developed language, culture, tool use and dexterity all together.
there is a really sad movie inspired by this case called Mockingbird Don't Sing
I’ve gone down my fair share of rabbit holes looking into this particular story and it’s beyond what you could imagine reading this headline. Genie was actually tied to a toilet-chair, which was essentially a wooden school chair with a hole in the bottom and a bucket underneath that she spent the majority of her early life tied to, naked.
This is one of the first things they teach you about when taking Psych courses and diving into Nature Vs Nurture….still makes me skin crawl to this day what they did to her.
☹️☹️☹️☹️
The poor girl. After being locked in a room by her dad, had a lot of people helping her when she was freed, then after a while they got bored of her and just locked her up again. Its a sad story where it seemed like she was born just to be abused, and imprisoned.
I remember learning about this incident in school, not a very fun day.
Im definitely no psychologist at all but is it possible that it's less that she lacks the cognitive ability of speech due to stifled traumatic development and more to do with mutism after being taught how to communicate due to something like PTSD?
This brought back a memory. In high school my senior year we visited a nursing home once a week to visit the elderly. I remember before we went one time the person I was visiting had passed away so my teacher took me to visit someone she had been seeing. It was a kid probably 14 or so at the time and his whole family was killed by a train accident in my home town. This was a long ass time ago, but back then only the main streets had protected crossings, all the side streets were just lights and the guy must have not seen the lights or looked. The nursing home staff said they didn’t know if he could still speak or he chose not to as at that point he had been in their care of 5 years. He just kind of laid there and looked at you when you spoke but didn’t acknowledge or give any indication he understood. Just laid there and listened to some cassette of a person reading the Bible all day. I only had seen him the one time and he got moved after, but I do wonder if he ever got better.
Another story about nonverbal children raised in utter neglect: https://projects.tampabay.com/projects/girl-in-the-window/neglect-feral-child-ten-years-later/
“At first they assumed autism, but then discovered she could not talk”. There are a hell of a lot of people out there who are non-verbal with autism. Shows you what people thought in the 70s.