Feral child

A feral child (feral, ie. "wild" or undomesticated) is a human child who, from a very young age, has lived in isolation from human contact and has remained unaware of human social behavior, and unexposed to language. A feral child is an extremely rare phenomenon, and there are only just over a hundred known cases FeralChildren.com contains a list of 117 cases here..

Origins and effects

Feral children may be separated from society by being lost or abandoned in the wild. The category also includes children who have been purposely kept apart from human society, e.g. kept in a room in solitary confinement. Sometimes abandonment is because of parents rejecting a child's severe intellectual impairment or physical disability, and some feral children experience severe child abuse or trauma before being abandoned.

Some myths and legends, and later many fictional stories depict feral children as having been reared by wild animals such as wolves or bears. Famous examples include Edgar Rice Burroughs' Tarzan and Rudyard Kipling's Mowgli.

Legendary and fictional feral children are often depicted as growing up with relatively normal human intelligence and skills and an innate sense of culture or civilization, coupled with a healthy dose of survival instincts; their integration into human society is made to seem relatively easy. In reality, however, feral children lack the basic social skills which are normally learned in the process of enculturation. For example, they may eat with their hands at a great rate, be unable to learn to use a toilet, have trouble learning to walk upright and display a complete lack of interest in the human activity around them. They often seem mentally impaired and have almost insurmountable trouble learning a human language. The subject is treated with a certain amount of realism in François Truffaut's 1970 film L'Enfant Sauvage (UK: The Wild Boy, US: The Wild Child), where a scientist's efforts in trying to rehabilitate a feral boy meet with great difficulty.

It is essentially impossible to convert a child who became isolated at a very young age into a relatively normal member of society. Such individuals need close care throughout their lives. As they are "discovered", feral children become the subject of lively scientific and media interest. Once the excitement dies down and their limitations in terms of learning culture and social behaviour become obvious, frustration can set in and they often spend the rest of their lives passed from one caregiver to another. It is common for them to die young.

Ancient reports

Herodotus, the historian, wrote that Egyptian pharaoh Psammetichus I (Psamtik) sought to discover the origin of language by conducting an experiment with two children. Allegedly, he gave two newborn babies to a shepherd, with the instructions that no one should speak to them, but that the shepherd should feed and care for them while listening to determine their first words. The hypothesis was that the first word would be uttered in the root language of all people. When one of the children cried “becos” (a sound quite similar to the bleating of sheep) with outstretched arms the shepherd concluded that the word was Phrygian because that was the sound of Phrygian word for “bread.” Thus, they concluded that the Phrygians were an older people than the Egyptians. Whether or not the Herodotus story is true is not known.

Real-life cases

Of the approximately 100 cases often cited, few have been confirmed or well studied, many lack detail, and many may have been exaggerated and embellished. Here is a limited list:

Hessian wolf-children (1341-1344)
The Bamberg boy, who grew up among cattle (late 1500s)
Hans of Liege; the Irish boy brought up by sheep
The three Lithuanian bear-boys (1657, 1669, 1694)
The girl of Oranienburg (1717)
The two Pyrenean boys (1719)
Peter the Wild Boy of Hamelin (1724)
The girl of Songi in Champagne (1731)
The Hungarian bear-girl (1767)
The wild man of Kronstadt (end of eighteenth century)
Victor of Aveyron (1797), portrayed in the 1969 movie by François Truffaut The Wild Child (L'Enfant sauvage)
Kaspar Hauser (early 1800s), portrayed in the 1974 film by Werner Herzog The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser (Jeder für sich und Gott gegen alle)
Amala and Kamala, females aged 1 and 8 raised by wolves, found in 1920 near Midnapore, Calcutta region, India
Genie, California, discovered 1970
Oxana Malaya, Ukraine, (1990s) raised with dogs until the age of 8
John Ssebunya, Uganda, (1991) raised by monkeys for several years in the Ugandan jungle.
Traian Căldărar, Romania, (2002) lived 3 years of his childhood with wild dogs in the Romanian wilderness
Sunjit Kumar, Fiji, (2005) raised in a chicken coop.

Notes and references

External links

Bibliography

Kenneth B. Kidd (2004). Making American Boys: Boyology and the Feral Tale. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. ISBN 0-8166-4295-8.
Michael Newton (2002). Savage Boys and Wild Girls: A History of Feral Children. London: Faber and Faber. ISBN 0-571-21460-6.

Feral children | Mysterious people