Genie Wiley - TLC Documentary (2003)

Comment on the story of Genie Wiley.

There are many ethical concerns surrounding Genie's story. Arguments among those in charge of Genie's care and rehabilitation reflect some of these concerns. If you want to do rigorous science, then Genie's interests are going to come second some of the time. If you only care about helping Genie, then you wouldn't do a lot of the scientific research," suggested psycholinguist documentary focused on her life. In Genie's case, the role of researcher and therapist were combined in one person. While Genie's story may be studied for its implications in our understanding of language acquisition and development, it is also a case that will continue to be studied over its serious ethical issues. I think future generations are going to study Genie's case not only for what it can teach us about human development but also for what it can teach us about the rewards and the risks of conducting 'the forbidden experiment.

Genie Wiley's story perhaps leaves us with more questions than answers. Though it was difficult for Genie to learn language, she was able to communicate through body language, music, and art once she was in a safe home environment. Unfortunately, we don't know what her progress could have been had adequate care not been taken away from her. Genie's story raises questions about how we can better address the needs of child abuse survivors, as well as how we can learn from them without exploiting their cases or disrupting their care. Of course, Genie's case is not so simple. Not only did she miss the critical period for learning language, but she was also horrifically abused. She was malnourished and deprived of cognitive stimulation for most of her childhood. Researchers were also never able to fully determine if Genie had any pre-existing cognitive deficits. As an infant, a pediatrician had identified her as having some type of mental delay. So researchers were left to wonder whether Genie had experienced cognitive deficits caused by her years of abuse or if she had been born with some degree of intellectual disability. After assessing Genie's emotional and cognitive abilities, I described her as "the most profoundly damaged child I've ever seen Genie's life is a wasteland." Her silence and inability to use language made it difficult to assess her mental abilities, but on tests, she scored at about the level of a one-year-old. She soon began to make rapid progression in specific areas, quickly learning how to use the toilet and dress herself. Over the next few months, she began to experience more developmental progress but remained poor in areas such as language. She enjoyed going out on day trips outside of the hospital and explored her new environment with an intensity that amazed her caregivers and strangers alike.

I think I can see the effects of isolation when Genie Wiley was discovered at the age of thirteen, she was in a state of physical and mental decline due to her extreme isolation. Her physical condition had deteriorated significantly, as she had not been exposed to any form of stimulation or nutrition since infancy. She was unable to walk, and had difficulty controlling her body movements which were often jerky and uncoordinated. Cognitively, Genie’s development had been severely stunted. She did not understand concepts such as time, space and color and could only communicate through rudimentary sounds. Her language abilities were far behind what would be expected for a thirteen-year-old. In addition, Genie exhibited signs of extreme emotional fragility: she would often react with fear to even the slightest stimuli, such as being touched or spoken to by someone unfamiliar. Genie Wiley was separated from any form of socialization and society for the first 13 years of her life. Her intensely abusive father and helpless mother so neglected Wiley that she hadn’t learned to speak and her growth was so stunted that she looked like she was no more than eight years old. Her intense trauma proved something of a godsend to scientists of various fields including psychology and linguistics, though they were later accused of exploiting the child for their research on learning and development. But Genie Wiley’s case did beg the question: What does it mean to be human.

In conclusion, I believe that the case of Genie confirms that there is a certain window of opportunity that sets the limit for when you can become relatively fluent in a language. Of course, if you already are fluent in another language, the brain is already primed for language acquisition and you may well succeed in becoming fluent in a second or third language. If you have no experience with grammar, however, Broca’s area remains relatively hard to change: you cannot learn grammatical language production later on in life.”

[Reporter] Officials in the Los Angeles
suburb of Arcadia

have taken custody of a
13-year-old girl and they say

was kept in such
isolation by her parents

that she never even
learned to talk.

The girl still wore diapers and
was uttering infantile noises

when a social worker discovered
the case two weeks ago.

But the authorities are
hoping she still

may have a normal
learning capacity.

[Narrator] Among the first to
see the child was

Temple City Detective,
Sergeant Frank Linley.

[Linley] I already knew that
the child was 13 1/2 years old.

And I took one look at her

and she wasn't much
bigger than my daughter,

Beverly, who had just
turned seven

about three months earlier.

And I really had a hard
time conceiving of the idea

that the child was the age
that she was.

The child obviously
had been severely mistreated

as she was still in diapers,
couldn't walk,

she had no verbal skills
at all at that point.

The last time I was
on this street was probably

30 years ago.

Yep, there it is.

Hasn't changed much.

The back yard looks the same.

It's all weeds and dead grass.

Looks the same
as it did in 1970.

[Narrator] The house belonged
to Clark Wiley.

A loner, Clark had turned
his back on the world

after his mother had been killed
in a hit and run accident.

After the accident,

things in the Wiley house
would never be the same again.

[Linley] The house was completely dark.

All the blinds were drawn
and there were no toys,

no clothes, nothing
that would ever indicate

to you that a child
of any age lived there.

The child's bedroom was
back in this corner.

That was the bedroom.

The windows were covered to
about three inches from the top.

Which were the only natural
light that had ever come in

there in all the time
the child was in the bedroom.

Entire furnishings of
the bedroom consists of a cage

with a pull down
chicken wire lid and some type

of piece of wire securing
it when they closed it down.

There was a potty chair

with some kind of
homemade strapping device.

[Narrator] For 13 years, Genie had spent
her nights locked in bed.

Her days, strapped
to a potty chair.

During that time Clark had
ordered his son John

and wife Irene, never
to talk to her.

In her darkened room, she had led
a life of near total isolation.

Even close neighbors were
completely unaware of her presence.

[Laicans] We came home from work
and the police was here

and they came to question us.

That's when we found out,
you know,

what happened and, you know,
that they had a little girl.

Nobody knew, nobody knew before.

And when we found out

what happened
and how she was treated,

I mean, everybody was shocked
and just unbelievable.

[Narrator] For their whole marriage,

Clark had imposed
his will on Irene.

And blind with cataracts,

she had been too
scared to resist.

But one day something broke.

While Clark was
out buying groceries,

she seized her chance and fled.

It was the first glimpse

the world would have of Clark
and Irene's dark secret.

[Linley] I met Clark and Irene at
Temple City Sheriff's Station.

They were both under arrest
at the time.

When we interviewed Irene
she would make no mention

of the family whatsoever,
particularly the children.

I attempted along with
my partner to interview Clark.

He refused to talk to us.
He wouldn't say a word.

He never even acknowledged

that he understood
what we were talking about.

[Woman] Mr. Wiley?
[Wiley] Yes.

[Woman] Why did you keep
your daughter in a room--

[Man] Mr. Wiley has no comment.
[Wiley] No comment.

[Man] We haven't had time
to discuss the charge

and we haven't even seen them.

[Narrator] Unable to face the truth,

Clark took matters
into his own hands.

[Reporter] This morning the authorities
reported that 70 year old Clark Wiley

shot and killed himself just
before he was to go to court

and be arraigned
for child abuse.

[Narrator] After 13 years,
Genie was at last free.

And for scientists,

she was just the case
they had been waiting for.

For 13 years Genie had lived
a life of complete isolation.

Raised in a city bedroom,
Genie was as much

a feral child as if she
had been brought up by wolves.

At 13 she was the size
of a six year old.

Worst of all she had never
been taught to speak.

The question now,
could she ever learn?

Genie's case was so
scientifically important

that the government funded
a team of scientists

to help answer the many
questions she posed.

Two of the scientists who would
become especially important

to Genie were
child psychologist James Kent

and linguist Susan Curtiss.

[Curtiss] It's so wonderful
to see you. God.

[Narrator] Neither had ever encountered
a case as extreme as Genie's.

[Kent] We looked at her as a--

as a newborn in a way.

Even though we know she hadn't--

she came with 13 years
of memories and experiences.

Not all of them wonderful.
Most of them not, I think.

And so we felt we needed

to start to expose her to what
the world was going to be

like for her outside
the hospital bed.

[Narrator] To Genie, everything
was a new experience.

[Kent] We did what you
would do with--

with your own kids.

If you were introducing
them to the world.

You'd take them out and
hold them up and show them.

Sort of judge from how they reacted

to whether this was too much

or not enough and you could
move on and do the next thing.

[Narrator] Genie was making
amazing progress.

As the experts looked on,

they realized that she might
be the answer to the question

that had troubled science
for so long.

[Curtiss] So we seized
this wonderful opportunity

that she provided us
in as loving a way

as we could but using it
to finally get our chance

to address head-on
specific hypotheses

and notions about human language
and the human mind.

[Narrator] These hypotheses were based
on the latest ideas

about how children's
brains developed.

According to the theory,

young children could only learn
certain things at certain times,

called critical periods.

Language was one of
these critical periods

and according to the theory,

Genie who was now a teenager,
had missed her chance forever.

But incredibly, Genie seemed
to be proving the theory wrong.

As this footage shows,
Genie was blossoming.

Not only was she delighted
by the world around her

but she was learning the words

for the new things
she was seeing.

[Curtiss] She was extremely
interested in everything around her.

She wanted to know the word
for everything around her.

She wanted to engage
people all around her.

She was not mentally deficient.

Her lights were on and everyone

who worked with her from
teachers to therapists to me,

knew that she was not retarded.

It was clear as day.

And as she began to learn more
and more words,

hundreds of words, much more
rapidly than I ever imagined.

And string them together, I began
to think maybe I will be wrong.

Maybe she will be the one

that will prove that
this hypothesis is incorrect.

[Narrator] But Genie could not
escape the effects

of her past so easily.

She was still haunted
by her traumatic upbringing.

Trapped by the memories of
the awful fate she had suffered.

And linguistically, she
had stopped making progress.

[Curtiss] She learned
tons of words.

She has an enormous vocabulary.
But language is not words.

Language is grammar.
Language is sentences.

How do you make a sentence?
What can be a sentence?

What is a sentence?

How do you automatically
know something's a sentence?

So it wasn't because she
was cognitively deficient

in other respects, it was because
she was cognitively deficient

in this island of human mind.

The mental faculty
that we call grammar.

[Narrator] At the time Genie was found,

brain science was in its infancy.

But today we have a much clearer picture

of what actually happens in cases

of extreme neglect, like Genie's.

[Perry] In Genie's brain,
the left part of her brain,

her cortex, that has those
neural systems responsible

for speech and language.

Because she never
heard any words

and because she
was never taught--

spoken to very often.

They didn't get stimulated.

And because they
weren't stimulated,

they got smaller
and less functional

and disconnected and ultimately

that part of the brain
literally physically changes.

[Narrator] Today with modern
imaging technology,

we can actually see what happens
in the brains of feral children.

And the effects are shocking.

Without normal stimulation,

their brains are smaller and malformed.

And the earlier this neglect begins
and the longer it carries on,

the worse the damage will be.

Starved of stimulation,

Genie's brain had simply not developed

the capacity for language.

And now that she was a teenager,

she would never be able to learn.

Despite this, Genie continued
to be a close part of everyone's life.

But, there was more trouble ahead.

[Kent] Children have to belong
to somebody when they grow up

and she was still a child.

And she needed a family to belong to.

So that's what we would have liked,

a family that she could belong to.

And that's not what happened unfortunately.

What did happen is about the worst outcome

I think we would have envisioned.

[Narrator] On her 18th birthday,

Genie moved back with her
mother, Irene, into the house

in which she had been so terribly abused.

But after only a few weeks,

it was clear that Irene couldn't cope.

From here,
Genie was moved into state care

with terrible consequences.

[Curtiss] I was a student and
people wouldn't listen to me.

People who needed to intervene
did not listen to me.

And so I spent lots and lots
of time on the phone pleading

with people to intervene and save this person,

who had had the worst experience

of deprivation and isolation
in all recorded medical history.

[Narrator] Genie moved from home to home.

Sometimes with the very people
who served as her therapists.

This potential conflict of
interest raised tensions

among the many people involved in her life.

And a tug of war erupted over the child.

As Genie's condition deteriorated,

Irene decided that Susan Curtiss

and the other academics had
become too close to Genie.

A lawsuit followed.

[Curtiss] I went from being asked
to be her guardian, to one week

later being prevented from
seeing her or phoning her.

And ever since then
I've been prevented

from having any contact at all.

So although I have lots of,
you know, I'm still a scientist,

I'm still interested in knowing
things about her language now.

And all kinds of interesting things

I would like to pursue academically,

primarily, I would just like to see her.

[Narrator] Now a ward of the court,

Genie lives in an adult
care home somewhere

in Los Angeles, prevented
from seeing the people

who once meant so much to her.