Feral Children

Reaction Paper #2 Alexis Simone SYG2000 Feb 12th 2013 Something that sparked my interest as soon as it was brought up was Feral Children. I never heard the exact term before and then when it was explained I realized it was a wild child basically. A Feral child is a child that in reality was neglected, abandoned, and also abused at a very early age; a lot of the time because of psychical handicaps or mental illness. The child has no experience or contact with love, or care, or socialization. Socialization is a process by which we learn how to live and act in a society and is crucial in adapting as a human being. Socialization involves language, behaviors and ideologies that in turn make us who we are and is a never-ending process. Feral Children never learn socialization and a lot of the times not even language. They can’t speak a bit of English, or any language pertaining to their culture and carry more animal characteristics than human. Some of them cannot even walk upright. Feral children are indeed both real, and mythical creatures. Although there’s not much scientific knowledge about them, they have been deemed real. One of the best examples is a man named Reverend Singh who in 1920 claimed to have discovered 2 girls who had been “brought up by wolves” in a forest in India. No one knows the truth, and many people say the 2 girls suffered from a mental illness, but being that he is a Reverend his word was very honest to many. Another good, more recent, extremely shocking example that I literally just researched is from 2007, Danielle Crockett from Florida, who wasn’t raised by animals in the wild, but animals in her own home. She was locked in a room and deprived of human interaction and food for the first 7 years of her life by her Mother. The neighbors had known the Mother had 2 adult sons but never saw a little girl until one day she was looking out of a broken window in her room. The neighbors saw her only 1 time. A month later the cops