Feral Children - The Outcome of Extreme Neglect
Oxana Malaya, Ukraine
For six years, Oxana Malaya spent her life living in a kennel with dogs. Totally abandoned by her alcoholic mother and father, she was discovered behaving more like an animal than a human child. She ran on all fours, panted with her tongue out, bared her teeth and barked, just like the dogs she had been living with.
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Feral Oxana
Dr Bruce Perry of the Child Trauma Academy in Houston, Texas tells us “One of the central questions, in all of science, that have to do with humans is: Are we a product of our genes or a product of our experiences, the old nature or nurture issue.
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Oxana's kennel
The doctors attempting to rehabilitate Oxana first want to learn the facts of her story. The information was sketchy. Oxana was born in November 1983 in Novaya Blagoveschenka, Ukraine. She weighed 5lb 11oz and had no abnormalities. Her parents were alcoholics and, one night, too drunk to care, they left their daughter outside. Looking for warmth, the three year old crawled into the farm kennel and curled up with the mongrel dogs who probably saved her life.
A concerned neighbour finally reported Oxana’s case to the authorities when the girl was eight. By then the effects of her time with the dogs had created serious consequences for Oxana’s development.
Anna Chalaya, director of the Odessa Institute recalls “She was more like a little dog than a human child. She couldn’t speak, or could hardly speak. In Fact, she didn’t seem to think it was necessary to speak at all”.
Lyn Fry an educational psychologist observers “When we’re talking about how a child learns to live with dogs, there’s obviously no deal, as such. There’s give and take, the dogs give their love, attention, and acceptance in a sense, while the child has to adapt to the dog’s situation. If that means eating raw meat and scavenging the rubbish tip, then that’s what has to be done in order to survive”.
Oxana did not know what a mirror was and showed no recognition of the reflected image of herself. This lack of self-awareness makes her, in some respects, more like an animal than a human.
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Raised by wolves, the mythical brothers Romulus and Remus, the founders of Rome, are perhaps the best-known feral children, but real cases are extremely rare and the process of learning how to rehabilitate such children has been slow and difficult.
The first scientifically documented case has a direct bearing on understanding Oxana’s condition. It occurred in 1800 in France. Two hunters had been out tracking deer in woods near Aveyron in the South West of France. For years, villagers had talked of a wild child who lurked in the forest. News of the capture spread fast and sent shockwaves throughout Europe. The young boy was taken to Paris where he was named Victor. The general medical profession thought him little more than a savage. Dr Jean Marc Gaspard Itard was the only man prepared to investigate the astonishing case in front of him. Confident he could civilise the boy, he began work.
Linda Blair a clinical psychologist explains “Dr Itard’s benchmarks for studying what makes us human were empathy and language. I think nowadays we would still agree, but I think we would add to that a sense of self, an awareness of self. Dr Itard was already there because empathy, caring for others, can’t really happen unless you have an awareness and a feeling of safety or peace within yourself”.
Although progress was slow, Dr Itard and his housekeeper, Madame Guérin, persevered. One lunchtime, as Victor was laying the table, he noticed that Mme. Guérin was crying; she had just lost her husband. Quietly he removed a place setting. This was the breakthrough for which Itard had been waiting. At last Victor was showing real human compassion, or empathy.
Michael Newton the author of Savage Girls and Wild Boys noted “By doing that, he was showing his ability to put himself in the position of another human being. Something which when he was first brought to Paris would have seemed impossible”.
Victor’s empathy satisfied Itard’s first test of humanity. He had taught the boy to feel, but could Victor now learn to speak? Itard knew that Victor would have to master vowel sounds, the building blocks of language. This time, Victor was at a loss. For him, it was all no more than a game. If the boy couldn’t discriminate between sounds it was likely that he would never learn to talk.
For the next 20 years, Victor would live with Mme. Guérin, happy but abandoned by the man who tried to civilise him.
Oxana Malaya was rescued from the wild at a younger age than Victor, but the question still remained as to whether the years spent living with dogs have damaged her chances of ever becoming a socialised human being.
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There are few cases of feral children who have been able to fully compensate for the neglect they’ve suffered. Oxana is now 22, but her future still hangs in the balance. Have scientists learned enough from previous cases to rehabilitate her?
Oxana has made good progress; she has learned to talk which is unusual in cases of feral children. Linda Blair offers an explanation “Oxana had to have heard language on a regular basis. It may not have been directed to her, but she had to have been exposed to it and also to have seen humans talking to each other”. Victor never learned to talk and Genie Wiley, the wild girl from Los Angeles, although able to learn words, never mastered grammar so was unable to hold any kind of conversation.
In order to get a clearer sense of Oxana’s intellectual capacities Dr Lyn Fry asks her to draw a picture of her home with herself in it. “A drawing of a person has always been taken as a good judge of basic ability and her drawing was what you would expect from a six year old”.
Dr Fry has also brought some standard cognitive tests to assess Oxana’s verbal and non-verbal skills. After an exhaustive session, Oxana only manages to demonstrate the ability of a five year old.
Today, Oxana lives in the Baraboy Clinic in Odessa where she works with the farm animals. Dr Vladimir Nagorny offers his view “She’s only able to live this practical life in this particular community under the supervision of her carers”.
Source: http://www.mymultiplesclerosis.co.uk...-children.html
Victor of Aveyron: A feral child who supposedly lived in the French wilderness until he was 12
Victor of Aveyron: A feral child who supposedly lived in the French wilderness until he was 12
Source: http://www.thevintagenews.com/2017/0...til-he-was-12/
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“Feral child” is a term used to describe youngsters who grew up isolated from human communities and have never been accustomed to fundamental conventions such as language, education and rules for socially acceptable behavior. Throughout history, cases of feral children have been documented. In many such instances, the children were raised by wild animals, people believed. However, in recent times, the authenticity of many of these cases has been challenged.
Stories of feral children appear in folklore and fiction. In 1894, Rudyard Kipling published a famous collection of stories named The Jungle Book. It follows the adventures of Mowgli, a feral child raised by wolves who learns the languages of various wild animals and establishes personal connections with them. By the end, Mowgli learns to abide by conventions and becomes a functioning member of civilized society. The Jungle Book popularized the motif of feral children in literature and pop culture, and Mowgli became a beloved children’s character known for his compassion, kindness, and adaptiveness.
In reality, “feral children” rarely integrated fully into society. The lack of proper care, emotional stimulation, and education hindered their social progress and delayed their mental development. Feral children often became the subjects of scientific studies and debates that stigmatized them and turned them into lab subjects, used to prove scientific theories.
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An illustration of Victor of Aveyron.
Such was the case of Victor of Aveyron, a French feral boy who lived in the woods of the Aveyron region in the late 1790s and was allegedly raised by wolves. Victor had reportedly been sighted by local villagers as early as 1794, and in 1797, he was caught by local hunters and brought to a town. A young widow cared for him there for several months, but he managed to escape and return to the woods. He voluntarily emerged from the woods in 1800.
The boy was then around 12 years old and couldn’t speak any language. The physicians who first examined him thought that he might have been deaf and mute. After he was examined at the National Institute of the Deaf in Paris, it was determined that he was completely healthy but had never come into contact with any language. He was comfortable being naked and had no problem with roaming around in cold weather, which led the researchers of the time to conclude that he was well accustomed to the harsh conditions of the wilderness.
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An illustration of Victor of Aveyron published in a German newspaper. The title says “The Wilding from Aveyron.”
When Victor of Aveyron was found, the Enlightenment movement was in full swing; many prominent scientists of the time believed that the ability to learn and abide by conventions is the only feature which differentiates humans from animals. Several researchers, including a famous instructor of the deaf named Roch-Ambroise Cucurron Sicard, attempted to teach Victor French and the basics of communication to prove that the development of one’s language and social abilities depends on one’s surroundings.
Although Victor showed some signs of progress, he was aggressive, hyperactive, and uninterested in learning. This eventually led researchers to the conclusion that he would never be able to adapt to any social convention, so they mostly gave up on his future. He was left to roam the corridors of the National Institute of the Deaf and become a kind of local attraction.
Fortunately, he was adopted by a medical student named Jean Marc Gaspard Itard, who arranged for him to move into his own home. Itard was the one who gave him the name “Victor”; up to that point, he was known only as the “Wolf Child.” Under Itard’s close supervision, Victor managed to learn several phrases and accept some social conventions, but never became a fully functional member of society. Still, he received proper care and led a peaceful life until 1828, when he died of pneumonia at an estimated age of 40.
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A portrait of Jean Marc Gaspard Itard.
Although Itard failed in his efforts to educate Victor, he is praised for founding an oral education program for the deaf and introducing new methods of pedagogy that include the use of behavior modification with severely impaired children.
In the last 50 years, while Victor’s life has been adapted several time for fiction or the big screen, such as in Francois Truffaut’s The Wild Boy, some academic researchers have speculated that very few genuine “feral children” existed, and that instead these children were probably abandoned by their families a short time before being found, or had severe disabilities. In some cases, the children being raised by animals were hoaxes perpetrated by the public. One professor wrote that Victor probably had a case of severe autism, rather than showing the effects of being raised by wolves.