Tag: abuse

Genie was born in 1957 in California. Her father determined that
she was mentally disabled and therefore not worthy of his attention or
care. He isolated her from everybody – locking her alone inside a room
until she reached the age of 13. While inside this room, he kept her
strapped to a toilet or enclosed in a crib. Due to her isolation, she
was incapable of communicating or walking when she was finally rescued
by Los Angeles child welfare authorities on 4 November, 1970. Her father
would beat her with a plank wood each time she attempted to communicate
with her family and would bark and growl at her like a dog to
intimidate her – this instilled a severe fear of dogs which continued
after she was freed. He even grew his fingernails; the sole purpose
being so he could scratch at Genie is she ever “misbehaved.” After she
was freed, she was often used as a case study for psychologists,
linguists, and scientists. She was sent into care and while there seemed
to be a series of breakthroughs in the beginning, there were also major
setbacks – she was exploited and also abused by those who were supposed
to be caring for her – she was sent to an extremely religious foster
care home in which she retreated and in 1977, she managed to tell a
children’s hospital that her foster parents had physically punished her
when she had been sick. Following this, her speech never recovered and
nobody knows for sure what became of her other than she was sent to an
institute for the mentally undeveloped in Southern California in 2008.

Genie
The name given to a feral child who spent the first thirteen years of her life locked inside a bedroom. She spent most of that time strapped to a potty chair and if she was lucky, she would get wrapped up in a sleeping bag and placed in an enclosed crib.

Her father would beat her and torture her. He also barked and growled at her like a dog in-order to scare her. By the time she was discovered by L.A authorities on November 4, 1970 , she was mostly mute. She had a vocabulary of about 20 words, most of which were negative (such as “stop it” and “no more.”) Documentary [x]

Sylvia Likens was sixteen and her sister Jenny was fifteen in July of 1965, when they were entrusted to the care of a skinny, asthmatic, chain smoking – and as it turned out, psychotic – woman named Gertrude Baniszewski. Likens’ parents had offered Baniszewski $20 a week to let their girls live with her while they traveled with a carnival, operating a concession stand. Soon – and no one seems to know why – Baniszewski started to beat the girls, but then she focused her illogical rage on Sylvia. She also began to invite neighborhood kids, who hung out at Gertrude’s house, to beat and torture Sylvia as well. Some kids would practice judo on her, and some would put out their cigarettes on her skin. On at least one occasion, Gertrude put Sylvia in scalding hot water to “cleanse her of her sins.” For a time Sylvia was allowed to leave the house, but eventually she became a kidnapped victim and was locked in the cellar and fed minimal food. Baniszewski used a needle to carve the words “I am a prostitute” onto her stomach. On October 26, 1965, Sylvia died from brain swelling, internal bleeding, and shock. Baniszewski and the family members and neighbors who took part in the torture, kidnapping, and murder were tried and convicted of various degrees of crime. Sylvia’s parents were not charged. Her sister Jenny died in 2004 at the age of 54, and Baniszewski, who had been released from prison on parole in 1985, died of lung cancer in 1990.