The Tragic Story of Genie: A Girl Denied Human Interaction and Language Development, Study notes of Developmental Psychology

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Chapter 7

Innocence lost: the story of Genie

One day in early November 1970, a woman called Irene Wiley sought out the services

for the blind at her local Los Angeles County Welfare Office. Her 13-year-old daughter

accompanied her. Being completely blind in one eye, and with her cataracts causing

her 90% blindness in the other, Irene mistakenly led her daughter into the offices for

general social services instead. This mistake was to change both their lives forever. As

they approached the counter, the social worker stood transfixed, staring at the daugh-

ter. At first sight, she appeared to be six or seven years old with a stooped posture and

an unusual shuffling gait. A supervisor was called immediately and started an investiga-

tion. Finally, after 13 years of neglect, isolation and abuse, the world had become aware

of a girl who was subsequently known as ‘Genie’.1 2

(^1) ‘Genie’ was a scientific alias given to protect her true identity. It was felt to be an appropriate choice, since she appeared to have come from nowhere. However, even at the time of the court case, news- papers reported names and addresses of those involved. It is now also so widely reported on the inter- net that there would seem little potential harm in revealing her real name to be Susan M. Wiley. Indeed, her brother John gave an interview to ABC News on 19 May 2008, giving further personal details of the case. See http://abcnews.go.com/Health/story?id=4873347&page= (^2) For a more detailed account of Genie, see Rymer, Russ (1993), Genie: A scientific tragedy. New York: HarperCollins.

Developmental psychology

Innocence lost: the story of Genie 59

probationary sentence. Clark was outraged; he believed society had treated him badly and he started to become more and more isolated. Clark decided that he could do without such a world and that his family could do the same. He quit his job and became a recluse. Clark moved the family to Pearl’s house on Golden West Avenue in Temple City, California. No one slept in Pearl’s bed- room and it was left untouched from the day that she died.

Unfortunately, Clark thought that the best way to protect his family was to also keep them at home. Clark used to sit in the evenings with a loaded gun on his lap. He thought he needed to prevent others in an evil world from exploiting their vulnerability. They were, indeed, vulnerable and they were to remain his virtual prisoners for the next decade. Neighbours reported hardly ever seeing the family. Perhaps Clark never realised that he didn’t protect them from his own evilness. An evilness far worse than any they might have expe- rienced in the outside world.

Isolation

On discovery, it was found that Genie had spent virtually her entire life in a small bedroom of their house in Golden West Avenue, Temple City, California. For most of that time she had been restrained on an infant’s potty seat at- tached to a chair. She had a calloused ring of hard skin on her bottom from sitting on the potty for days on end. She could not move anything except her fingers and hands, feet and toes. Sometimes at night she was moved to another restraining device, ostensibly a sleeping bag that had been altered to act as a straitjacket. Genie was then placed in a wire cot with a wire cover overhead for the night.

Genie was actively discouraged from making any sounds and, indeed, her father beat her with a stick if she made any. Clark would only make barking sounds and often growled at her like a dog might. Genie’s brother John, under instruction from his father, rarely spoke to her. Indeed, elsewhere in the house, her brother and mother usually whispered to each other for fear of annoying their father. Genie heard hardly any sounds in her isolation. Unsurprisingly, Genie learnt to keep silent. Her visual sense wasn’t stimulated either. The room had only two windows, both of which were taped up, except for a few centi- metres at the top to let in a little light. She could only see a glimpse of the sky in the outside world.

Occasionally, Genie was allowed to ‘play’ with two plastic raincoats that hung in the room. Sometimes, she was also allowed to look at edited TV pages with any ‘suggestive’ pictures having been removed by her father. Empty cot- ton reels were virtually her only other ‘toys’.

Genie was given very little to eat. She was given baby food, cereals and very occasionally a hard-boiled egg. She was fed quickly in silence by her brother so that contact with her was kept to a minimum. If she choked or spat out food, it was rubbed into her face. It is hard to imagine a more cruel and

60 Classic Case Studies in Psychology • Developmental psychology

deprived existence for a young child. This regime was maintained by Clark. Soon af- ter Genie’s birth a doctor had told Clark that Genie was retarded and would not live very long. He told Irene that if Genie did live for 12 years, they would seek help for her. Per- haps miraculously, Genie did live that long and, when Clark refused Irene’s requests for help, she decided to do something about it. After a horrendous fight during which Clark threatened to kill Genie, Irene took the child and left to stay at her parents’ home. A few days later they ended up at social services seeking help for her visual impairment and welfare payments for Genie. Genie had been discovered at last.

Placed in care

During the ensuing investigation, Genie was taken into care in the Children’s Hospital in California. Her parents were charged with wilful abuse of a minor and were due in court on 20 November 1970. On that morning, Clark took his Smith and Wesson and fired a bullet clean through his right temple. He had laid his funeral clothes out on the bed, with $400 for John, and left two suicide notes – one explained where the police could find his son, the other simply read: ‘The world will never understand. Be a good boy, I love you.’ Irene was already in court when she heard the news. She pleaded not guilty on the grounds that she had been forced to act the way she did by an abusive husband, and her plea was accepted. It seemed that at last Genie and Irene could begin life again. However, Irene agreed for Genie to become a ward of the state. Genie was examined at the Children’s Hospital and treated for severe mal- nutrition. She was actually 13 years old but she only weighed 59 pounds and was only 54 inches tall. She was incontinent and couldn’t chew solid food. She couldn’t swallow properly, salivated excessively and constantly spat. Her clothes were often covered in spit and she often urinated when excited. This meant that she often smelt badly. In addition, she could not focus her eyes be- yond 12 feet. What need was there for her eyes to focus beyond the distance of the world she had known in her bedroom? She had two sets of teeth and her hair was extremely thin. She walked with great difficulty and could not ex- tend her limbs properly. She did not seem to perceive heat or cold. She never cried and could barely talk. Although she could understand some words such as ‘Mother’, ‘blue’, ‘walk’ and ‘door’, she could only say a few negatives, which were rolled into one word, such as ‘stopit’ and ‘nomore’.

Rare photo of Genie, Susan Wiley. Credit: Bettman/CORBIS

62 Classic Case Studies in Psychology • Developmental psychology

The prize

Jay Shurley, a psychiatrist and acknowledged expert on the effects of isola- tion, was also invited to visit Genie. He described her as having suffered the most long-term social isolation of any child ever described in the literature. Rather worryingly, he noted that, because such cases didn’t come along that often, a contest had developed amongst the professionals interested in Genie as to who would conduct treatment and research with her. Far from being a neglected child that no-one took any interest in, Genie had become a prize. She became the centre of a political battle amongst the researchers. The researchers argued about Genie. Should her therapeutic interests be paramount, above those of the scientific research? It was argued that any sci- entific findings could help benefit deprived children in the future. Occasionally, Genie went and stayed overnight at the home of Jean Butler, one of her teachers from the rehabilitation centre. During one of these stays, Butler contracted rubella and, in the interests of all concerned, Genie was quarantined at home with her teacher. Butler became very protective of Genie and began to disagree with other members of the ‘Genie Team’ (as she referred to them). There were heated arguments as to the best way to proceed. Butler felt that Genie was being experimented on too much and that the research was intruding on her rehabilitation. The research team felt Butler wanted to become famous as the person who had rescued Genie from her isolation. Butler asked for Curtiss to be removed from the team and to no longer have access to Genie. At this time, Butler applied to be Genie’s foster parent. In the end this was rejected on the grounds that it was against hospital policy for patients to be placed in staff homes. With no obvious alternative foster parent, David Rigler, a professor and chief psychologist in the hospital’s psychiatry division, agreed to take Genie for a short period. The hospital policy about staff–patient rela- tionships was overturned. Genie stayed with the Riglers for four years. Unsurprisingly, Genie was not the ideal houseguest. She defecated in Rigler’s daughter’s wastebasket, took the other children’s possessions and continued to spit frequently. However, she did take a great interest in music. Curtiss be- gan playing a piano and Genie loved it. She became transfixed by the music but only if it was classical. Rigler discovered that, during her isolation, a neigh- bour used to have piano lessons and perhaps this was Genie’s only regular source of sound as a child. Genie was enrolled in a nursery school and then a public school for the mentally retarded, where she could interact with other children. She appeared to be blossoming at the Riglers’. She showed a good sense of humour, she learnt to iron and sew. She enjoyed drawing. Sometimes her drawings allowed her to depict her thoughts when her language failed her. On Gestalt drawing tests, which involve seeing the organisation behind a scattered scene or the whole picture from numerous parts, she scored higher than anyone in the lit- erature. One day in the summer of 1972, Genie was out with Curtiss shopping.

Innocence lost: the story of Genie 63

She seemed overjoyed with her experiences. Genie turned to Curtiss and said, ‘Genie happy’.

Meanwhile her mother Irene had had her eyesight restored due to a cata- ract operation and had moved back to her house on Temple Avenue. She continued to visit Genie. Unfortunately, she didn’t feel welcome at the Riglers’ and was only invited there three times in four years. She began to distrust the scientists looking after Genie and felt that they looked down on her. She never accepted any part in the abuse of Genie, whereas many of the scientists ques- tioned her passive role. Irene still maintained a friendship with Jean Butler, who also questioned the ‘scientific pursuit’ of Genie. Butler claimed Genie had actually declined in the Riglers’ care.

After four years, a research grant that the Riglers applied for to continue to study Genie was refused. There had been little progress in Genie after the initial few months and very few academic papers had been produced. Rigler argued that the ‘anecdotal’ nature of his research was at odds with those of the accepted scientific community. He no longer had the funds to look after or study Genie. Within a month, Genie was on the move yet again.

Back home

Rather surprisingly, she was allowed to move back home to be with her mother. Here she returned to the scene of her abuse. This was not a success. Her mother could not cope and social services again moved Genie to another foster home. This was a disaster. The new parents ran their home in a military fashion, quite at odds with Genie’s experiences at the Riglers’ and not in ac- cordance with her needs. In response to her new home, Genie regressed. Like her father, she turned inward and shut out the world. She wanted to control her life and she felt the only way to do this was to withhold her faeces and her speech. She became constipated and refused to speak at all for five months. The new foster mother became exasperated by this and once tried to extract her faeces with a lolly stick. The abuse had started again and she had to en- dure a stay of 18 months with this family. Genie’s life was falling apart, as was the academic research.

During this time, Curtiss was the only professional to visit her. She was no longer receiving a grant for the work, but had obviously developed a warm and caring relationship with Genie. Eventually, Genie ended up malnourished and Curtiss persuaded the authorities to readmit her to the Children’s Hospital.

Financial wrangles threatened to make matters worse. Genie had been left a small sum of money from her father’s estate and Rigler presented a bill for psychotherapy he had given during the time Genie had resided with him. This amounted to more than her small inheritance. The case went to court. Although Rigler won a partial award, he claims that he never saw any of the money. He later stated that he took these legal steps merely to prevent the state from taking her inheritance. However, when Irene became Genie’s legal guardian again and took over her estate, the money awarded was missing.

Innocence lost: the story of Genie 65

subsequent reports of her life inside the institution. Jay Shurley visited her on her 27th and 29th birthdays. He reported her as being chronically institu- tionalised, very stooped and without eye contact. She didn’t speak much and appeared to be depressed. He describes her as someone who was isolated, lived and experienced the world and all that it offers for a while, and then was placed back in isolation again. The scientific alias given to her was more apt than the researchers could ever have imagined.

In the interview in 2008, John Wiley noticed some comparisons between the Genie case and that of Austrian Josef Fritzl, who kept his daughter and other members of his family incarcerated in the cellar of his home for up to 24 years. Some of the family, when finally discovered, were physically malnour- ished with stooped statures and suffered from language deficits after years of isolation. It would be refreshing if the psychologists responsible for their future welfare could avoid some of the pitfalls that befell Genie.

Neurology

From early neurological investigations, it became obvious that Genie per- formed well on so-called right hemisphere tasks and extremely poorly on left hemisphere tasks. Usually, language is a task that is mainly associated with left hemisphere processing. Each hemisphere of the brain controls the opposite side of the body. This is called contra-lateral control. For example, a stroke in the left hemisphere is likely to lead to some disability on the right side of the body, and vice versa.

In a dichotic listening task, people are asked to listen through a set of head- phones to two different messages that are being played to each ear. In this circumstance, the sounds presented to each ear get processed almost entirely by the opposite hemisphere. Using this technique, Curtiss could present infor- mation to a specific hemisphere. Curtiss wanted to find out what processing was occurring in Genie’s brain. Curtiss found that Genie’s brain was processing language on the right hemisphere, whereas usually there is a marked preference for the left. Indeed, Genie’s performance on language presented to her left hemi- sphere was the same as children whose left hemisphere had been surgically removed. Curtiss concluded that our brain development is determined by our environment, more specifically, by our encounter with language before puberty.

Language acquisition: the unnatural

experiment

The way in which humans acquire language has been a matter of much debate amongst both linguists and psychologists. There are broadly two competing schools of thought: nativists, who place the emphasis on innate factors or ‘nature’, and empiricists, who place an over-riding importance on the effect of experience or ‘nurture’. Thus, language acquisition plays a part in the nature–

66 Classic Case Studies in Psychology • Developmental psychology

nurture debate. One way of resolving these arguments might be to take a child and allow them to hear no language at all. Would they still develop some kind of language based on their innate abilities? Pinker (1984) later stated that lan- guage acquisition is such a robust process that, ‘ there is virtually no way to prevent it from happening short of raising a child in a barrel’ (p.29). Of course, it’s obvious that no experiment of this type could ever be conducted, but with Genie, research- ers felt that they might have found a ‘natural’ experiment, one in which the suggested manipulation of the environment had ‘naturally occurred’. Her un- natural upbringing meant that researchers might be able to test out many of their hitherto untested hypotheses. The most well-known proponent of the nativist position is Noam Chomsky. Chomsky proposed that language acquisition cannot be explained by simple learning mechanisms alone. Chomsky argues that some portion of language is innate to humans and independent of learning. Empiricists, on the other hand, argue that language can be learnt without any intrinsic or innate ability. Nativist linguistic theorists believe that children learn language through an innate ability to organise the laws of language, but that this can only oc- cur with the presence of other humans. Other people do not formally ‘teach’ the child language, but the innate ability cannot be utilised without verbal human interaction. Learning undoubtedly plays a significant role since chil- dren in an English-speaking family learn English and so on. But nativists also claim that children are born with an innate language acquisition device (called LAD). The major principles of language are already in place and certain other parameters are set, dependent on the particular language that they learn. On being exposed to a language, the LAD makes it possible to set the appropriate parameters and deduce the grammatical principles underlying the language, whether it be English or Chinese. This nativist approach to language acquisition remains extremely contro- versial. There is evidence to support this view. For a start, all children appear to go through the same sequence of language development. A one-year-old speaks a few isolated words, a two-year-old can say a few two- or three- word sentences and a three-year-old can produce many grammatically cor- rect sentences. By the age of four, a child sounds very much like an adult. It is suggested that this consistency across cultures suggests an innate knowledge of language. At the age of 13, it was estimated that Genie had the language development of a one-year-old. In addition, there is the evidence of a universal grammar structure to all languages. Indeed, languages are similar in a number of different respects. Fur- thermore, there is evidence that profoundly deaf children, with no exposure to sign language or oral language, develop manual systems of communication that mirror many of the features of spoken language. Brown and Herrnstein^5 conclude, ‘ one irresistibly has the impression of a biological process developing in just the same way in the entire human species ’ (p.479).

(^5) Brown, R. and Herrnstein, R. (1975) Psychology. Boston: Little, Brown.

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car’. This shows she could use verbs occasionally and, according to some of her speech therapists, was acquiring some of the rules of grammar. But she never asked questions, she had great difficulty with pronouns (‘you’ and ‘me’ were interchangeable and reflected her egocentrism) and her development was painfully slow. This in spite of intensive training using the most advanced methods. Indeed, from this point on her language acquisition stopped and levelled out. The evidence remains inconclusive, but Genie provides some evidence for the ‘critical period hypothesis’. Her case suggests that language is an innate capacity of human beings that is acquired during a critical period between the ages of two and puberty. After puberty, it becomes more difficult for humans to learn languages, which explains why learning a second language is more difficult than learning a first one. However, Genie did acquire some language, so she showed that some language could be acquired after the critical period. Genie never managed to cope with grammar and it is this aspect which Chomsky argued distinguishes human language from animal language. From this viewpoint, Genie failed to develop language after having missed the critical period. In many respects, the argument boils down to what we count as ‘language’. The methodological problem with the study of Genie is that she wasn’t merely deprived of opportunities to practise and hear language. She was also abused in numerous other ways. She was malnourished and suffered from a lack of visual, tactile and social stimulation. Given the crucial role of lan- guage in human interaction and development, it is almost inevitable that anybody deprived of early language stimulation would also be deprived of other opportunities for normal cognitive or social development. Genie most certainly was. How could psychologists disentangle these effects? This proved impossible to do. In the case of Genie, there was also the lingering doubt as to whether she had been born with some biological or congenital retardation. Her father emphasised this throughout her early life and the paediatrician who examined Genie as an infant did mention some early problems. However, Irene stated that Genie had started to make babbling sounds and produce the odd word prior to her father placing her in isolation. This suggests that she might have been developing language at a normal speed prior to the abuse. Of course, this is anecdotal evidence and, as such, cannot be necessarily relied upon. In addition, Curtiss believed that Genie was not retarded. She scored very highly on spatial tests and she developed the ability to see something from another perspective. Susan Curtiss regarded Genie as refuting a strong version of Lenneberg’s critical period hypothesis, that natural language acquisition cannot occur after puberty (Curtiss, 1977, p.37). Genie did acquire some ‘language’ after puberty and Curtiss claimed that Genie also acquired language from ‘mere exposure.’ (p.208). However, subsequently it has been reported that Curtiss appeared to change her mind fairly radically about linguistic nativism. She suggested that Genie did not provide real evidence of true language development after pu-

Innocence lost: the story of Genie 69

berty. Separately, both Sampson^8 and Jones^9 detail the way in which Curtiss’s discussions of Genie in later publications contradicted what she wrote in her earliest book, although no fresh evidence was available to her and no expla- nations for the contradictions were ever given.

Postscript

What can we say about Genie? Certainly, her father failed her; the system set up to protect children from such abuse failed her; arguably even after her ‘discovery’, the professionals who set out to care for her failed her. Although Genie became perhaps the most famous case study in psychology, she did not provide conclusive evidence for or against the critical period hypothesis of language acquisition. She did become a focus of debate about the ethics of psychological research and the potential conflict between the demands of the scientist and the participant. With no definitive answer as to whether she was ‘retarded’ at birth, she was never going to help clarify the nature– nurture debate. Ultimately, Genie’s story can be seen as a catalogue of unfortunate or mis- guided mistakes. Indeed, she might be seen as the product of man’s inhuman- ity to man. However, her story can also be seen in a different light. Despite the abuse, the lack of care and love, despite all the suffering, mistrust and disin- terest she experienced, Genie still reached out to people, touched their hearts, became fascinated in life and showed us the true depth of human forgiveness. In her own special way, Genie remains an inspiring example to us all.

(^8) Sampson, G. (1997) Educating Eve. London: Cassell.

(^9) Jones, Peter (1995) ‘Contradictions and unanswered questions in the Genie case: a fresh look at the linguistic evidence’. Language and Communication , 15, 261–80.