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Genie (born 1957) is the pseudonym for a feral child who was a victim of severe abuse, neglect, and social isolation. Her circumstances are prominently recorded in the annals of abnormal child psychology. When Genie was a baby, her father decided that she was severely mentally retarded, causing him to dislike her and withhold care and attention. At approximately the time she reached the age of 20 months, Genie's father decided to keep her as socially isolated as possible, so from that time until she reached the age of 13 years and 7 months he kept her locked alone in a room. During this time, he almost always strapped her to a child's toilet or bound her in a crib with her arms and legs completely immobilized, forbade anyone from interacting with her, provided her with almost no stimulation of any kind, and left her severely malnourished.〔〔 The extent of Genie's isolation prevented her from being exposed to any significant amount of speech, and as a result she did not acquire language during childhood. Her abuse came to the attention of Los Angeles child welfare authorities on November 4, 1970. In the first several years after Genie's early life and circumstances came to light, psychologists, linguists, and other scientists focused a great deal of attention on Genie's case, seeing in her near-total isolation an opportunity to study many aspects of human development. Upon finding that Genie had not yet learned a language, linguists saw Genie as having the potential to be an important way to gain further insight into the processes controlling language acquisition skills and to test theories and hypotheses identifying critical periods during which humans learn to understand and use language. Throughout the time scientists studied Genie, she made substantial advances with her overall mental and psychological development. Within months of being discovered Genie had developed exceptional nonverbal communication skills and gradually learned some basic social skills, but even by the end of their case study she still had many behaviors characteristic of an unsocialized person. She also continued to learn and use new language skills throughout the time they tested her, but ultimately remained unable to fully acquire a first language.〔 When authorities first found Genie they initially arranged for her admission to Children's Hospital Los Angeles, which assembled a team of doctors and psychologists to manage her care, and her subsequent placements eventually gave rise to rancorous and protracted debate. After living at the hospital until late June 1971 she moved into the home of her teacher at the hospital for a month and a half, and upon removal from this home authorities placed her with the family of the scientist heading the research team for the next four years. In mid-1975, soon after turning 18, she went back to live with her mother, who could not adequately care for her. After a few months, Genie's mother then had her placed in the first of a series of at least six institutions for disabled adults. During the year and a half Genie lived at this location, she experienced further extreme physical and emotional abuse.〔〔 Cut off from almost all of the people who had studied her, her physical and mental health severely deteriorated and her newly acquired language and behavioral skills very rapidly regressed.〔〔 In early January 1978, Genie's mother suddenly decided to forbid all of the scientists except for one from having any contact with Genie, and all testing and scientific observations of her immediately ceased. Most of the scientists and doctors who studied and worked with Genie have not seen her since this time. The only post-1977 updates on Genie and her whereabouts are personal observations or secondary accounts of them, and all are spaced several years apart. As of 2008, ABC News reported that Genie was living in California, "in psychological confinement as a ward of the state—her sixth foster home. And again, she is speechless."〔 Although no one has conducted any scientific analysis of Genie since late 1977, psychologists and linguists have continued to discuss Genie's case and development long after this time and there has been considerable academic and media attention given to her life and the methods of the research team surrounding her. In particular, Genie's case has been extensively compared with that of Victor of Aveyron, a nineteenth-century French child who similarly became a classic case of late language acquisition and delayed psychological development.〔〔 ==Early history== Genie was the last, and second surviving, of four children born to parents living in Arcadia, California. Her father worked in a factory as a flight mechanic during World War II and got a job in the aviation industry after the war ended; her mother, originally from a family of farmers in Oklahoma, had come to southern California as a teenager with family friends fleeing the Dust Bowl. Both of them had extremely unstable upbringings, and had no meaningful level of education. During her early childhood, Genie's mother suffered an accident in which she sustained a severe head injury, giving her lingering neurological damage that caused degenerative vision problems in her right eye. Genie's father mostly grew up in various orphanages around the American Pacific Northwest, as his father had died of a lightning strike while he was a child and his mother had only limited contact with him while she ran a brothel, and his mother had given him a feminine first name which made him the target of constant derision. Because of this, as a child he harbored a great deal of resentment towards his mother; Genie's brother and the scientists who studied Genie believed this was the root of his anger problems later in life.〔 When Genie's father reached adulthood, he changed his first name to one which was more masculine. His mother began to spend as much time with him as she could, which later accounts of his life speculated may have been compensation for her lack of involvement in his childhood. Despite the fact that she found him extremely strict and difficult to be around, and unrelentingly argued with him about her unsuccessful efforts to convince him to adopt a less rigid lifestyle, he became almost singularly fixated on his mother. For the rest of her life he treated all other relationships, including those with his wife and subsequently his children, as ancillary at most.〔 From the start of the relationship between Genie's parents, the family and friends of Genie's mother had strongly opposed their marriage because her husband was around twenty years older than she. In the years immediately after getting married they seemed to be happy and living relatively well to most who knew them, but others thought he was very distant and isolated. He quickly began preventing his wife from leaving their home, and beat her with increasing frequency and severity.〔 After she married, her eyesight in both eyes started more rapidly deteriorating due to lingering effects from the preexisting neurological damage, the onset of severe cataracts, and a detached retina in one eye, forcing her to become increasingly dependent on her husband. From the outset of their relationship Genie's father made it very clear that he neither liked children nor ever wanted to have any, especially citing a dislike for all of the noises associated with them, but after about five years his wife became pregnant. Genie's father continued to beat her mother throughout her pregnancy, and she was in the hospital recovering from an attempt to beat and strangle her to death when she went into labor, but she gave birth to a daughter who appeared to be healthy. When the girl's crying disturbed her father, he placed her in the garage, and as a result she died of pneumonia at 10 weeks old.〔 Their second child, born a year later, was a boy diagnosed with Rh incompatibility who died at two days of age. Accounts vary as to whether his death was from complications of Rh incompatibility or from choking on his own mucus. Another son was born three years later, and despite also having Rh incompatibility, doctors described him as healthy. His father forced his wife to keep their son quiet as much as possible, and as a result he was slow to develop and late to walk and to talk. When he was four, his paternal grandmother grew concerned about her son's increasing instability and her grandson's developmental delays. She decided to take over her grandson's care for several months, and he made good progress with her before she eventually returned him to his parents.〔〔 Genie was born about five years after her brother, around the time that her father began to isolate himself and his family from those around them. Genie's delivery was a standard Caesarean section without any noted complications, and at birth she was in the 50th percentile for weight. The next day she showed signs of Rh incompatibility and required a blood transfusion, but did not appear to have any sequela from it and was otherwise described as healthy. A medical appointment at three months showed that she was gaining weight normally, but found a congenital hip dislocation which required her to wear a highly restrictive Frejka splint from the age of 4½ to 11 months. Due to the splint Genie was late to walk, and researchers believed this led her father to start speculating that she was mentally retarded. As a result, he made a concerted effort not to talk to or pay attention to her and strongly discouraged his wife and son from doing so.〔 There is relatively little information about Genie's early life, as Genie's parents did not consistently take her to the doctor, but medical records indicate that for the first several months of her life she underwent relatively normal development. Genie's mother later recalled that Genie was not a cuddly baby, did not babble much, and resisted solid food. At times she further claimed that at an undetermined point Genie began to say some individual words, although she could not recall what they were, but on other occasions said that Genie had never produced speech of any kind. Doctors and psychologists who later spoke with Genie never definitively determined which of her statements was accurate.〔 At the age of 11 months, Genie was still in overall good health but had fallen to the 11th percentile for weight, which the people who later studied her believed was a sign that she was starting to suffer some degree of malnutrition. Against the doctor's recommendation that she receive physical therapy after removal of the Frejka splint, her father refused to allow access to any further treatment. When Genie was 14 months old, she came down with a fever and pneumonitis and her parents took her to a pediatrician who had not previously seen her. The pediatrician said that although her illness prevented a definitive diagnosis, there was a possibility that she was mentally retarded and that the brain dysfunction kernicterus might be present. Her father's reaction, which one of the scientists who studied Genie said had no foundation in reality, was to take this opinion to mean that Genie was severely developmentally delayed, and used this to rationalize his subsequent treatment of her. Six months later, when Genie was 20 months old, a pickup truck hit and killed her paternal grandmother in a hit-and-run traffic accident. Her death deeply affected Genie's father far beyond a normal level of grief, and because she had been walking with her grandson, Genie's father viewed him as responsible, which further heightened his anger. When the truck's driver subsequently received only a probationary sentence for both manslaughter and drunk driving, he became nearly delusional with rage and decided to further increase the family's isolation.〔 One of the scientists who later worked with Genie and her mother believed that these events made Genie's father feel as if society had failed him and decided that he would need to protect his family from the outside world, and in doing so he lacked the self-awareness to recognize the destruction his own actions caused. He immediately quit his job and moved his family into the two-bedroom house his mother had been living in, and insisted on leaving his mother's car, which sat in the garage, and her bedroom completely untouched as shrines to her.〔 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Genie (feral child)」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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