She heard music, had "siblings," went to speech therapy, studied sign language, learned to sew, iron, and draw.ĭavid and Marilyn Rigler benefited financially and professionally from the arrangement. But, within a few weeks, Genie settled in and seemed to enjoy life with the family. At first, she misbehaved, using the whole house as her bathroom, and she had many self-destructive tantrums. Genie lived with the Riglers and their three children for four years. Butler charged that Genie was taken from her because, in trying to provide Genie with a reasonable home life, she had alienated the researchers, who were exploiting Genie and turning her into a human guinea pig through daily testing. David Rigler and his wife Marilyn, because Rigler also worked at Children's Hospital. Thus, it was not clear why Genie was then moved to the home of Dr. But Butler's application to become Genie's foster parent was denied by the Department of Public Social Services, which referred to a hospital policy that prohibited placement of patients in the homes of people who worked at the hospital. Her improvement was striking and her comfort in Butler's home was obvious. Then she moved to the home of Jeanne Butler, one of the hospital's rehabilitation therapists. There was a contest about who was going to investigate her, and how-about where to go with the treatment and research."Īt first, Genie was placed in Children's Hospital. "From being a totally neglected waif ? Genie had become a prize.
When Genie's story spread in the academic community, many researchers were eager to study her. Genie seemed to present them with a "natural experiment" for answering these questions, because she had heard almost no words in her thirteen years. Do people learn language from their environment or are they born with an innate ability to speak? Can people learn a language at any time in their lives or must they learn to speak when they are young? Psychologists, psychiatrists, linguists, and others had, over the years, posed a tangle of questions about how people learn to speak, how they build their vocabularies, and how they create meaningful sentences to communicate with others. When Genie emerged from her prison of silence, she was, ironically, thrust into the center of a war about words. Two inches of sky and the side of a neighbor's house were all that she could see through the top of the covered glass. Through a cracked-open window in her room, Genie may have heard airplanes overhead or faint piano music drifting from a neighbor's house. Sometimes, he sat all day with a loaded shotgun in his lap. He rarely permitted them to speak or to go outside. Genie's father also kept his wife and son, who was a few years older than Genie, captive. She could say "stopit," "nomore," "no," and a few other negative words. The only words addressed to her were angry ones. She had no books, no radio, no television.
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Her 'toys' were cottage cheese containers, two plastic raincoats, threadless spools of thread, and copies of TV Guide stripped of illustrations. Genie ate baby food, cereals, and soft-boiled eggs, all of which were fed to her. Whenever Genie made noise, her father would bark like a ferocious dog or beat her. At night, with her arms restrained, she slept in a sleeping bag inside a "crib-cage" made of wire and wood. During those 11 years, Genie was harnessed naked all day long to a toddler's potty seat. The father had locked Genie up to protect her from what he considered the dangers of the outside world. In the next few weeks, Genie's story came to light, and, shortly after it did, Genie's father killed himself.
But Genie was actually thirteen and had been in solitary confinement since she was two years old. She suspected the child might be autistic.
The girl was so tiny that the social worker estimated she might be six or seven years old. The social worker noticed that the "small withered girl" had "a halting gait" and "hands held up as though resting on an invisible rail," which gave her a curious, unnaturally stooped posture. The three had come into the Social Welfare office in Temple City, California, to learn about resources for the blind.
Genie, her nearly blind mother, and her elderly grandmother disturbed the social worker. Case 4 Genie, The Wild Child Research or Exploitation?
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