Feral
children are those that have been isolated from human contact at a very young age and as a result have developmental
imbalances.These
children are generally kept away from almost all kinds of human interaction(often by their parents) and consequently do not develop a lot of social skills such as speech, behavior and emotion.Scientists have been debating for decades whether or not speech can be acquired only in the earliest years of human life.Feral children have often been known to show animal like characteristics like sniffing, spitting and clawing and in most cases they find it difficult to adjust with society.Perhaps the most famous feral child is "Genie" who was
discovered in 1970 in a Los Angeles suburb.Genie was born in 1957 and was kept locked up in a room by her mentally unstable father for 13 years. Apart from a few words like "stopit" and "nomore" , Genie was mute. She was desperately weak for a teenager and used to constantly sniff and scratch at things around her. Her mental age was estimated to be around 2 years when she was discovered. Doctors were unable to teach her about her surroundings and said she will never develop mentally. After staying at a number of foster homes, Genie was returned to the social organization that had found her. She now lives in an undisclosed location in the United States. The movie Mockingbird don''t sing is based on her life. Other feral children around the world include Oxana Malaya (Ukrainian dog girl) who lived with a pack of dogs for 5 years and the Linz sisters from Linz, Austria who were kept locked up in an apartment for 5 years by their mother. Researchers are yet to understand the human brain thoroughly and cannot effectively comprehend such cases of extreme sensory deprivation.Whether or not children like Genie can ever lead normal lives still remains uncertain.