Essay Case Study Genie

Genie was found at the age of thirteen on November 4th, 1970 in the suburb of Arcadia, Los Angeles. She had suffered over a decade of abuse by being restrained to a potty chair in complete darkness and isolation and had no interaction with people or language except through the abuse of her father, who only communicated to her via snarling animal noises. After her discovery and the subsequent suicide of her abusive father, she was taken to Children's Hospital where she was looked after by a team of psychologists, linguists, and other scientists. Although the team of researchers were kind and caring, there were opposing views between them about how to go about researching Genie as well as helping her. Some of the issues that were brought up were that some of the researchers, …show more content…
This was a period of debate because Genie was discovered around the age of thirteen and, since denying a child of language is known as "the forbidden experiment" because it is so cruel, researchers were doing everything in their power to either prove or disprove this with Genie. Ultimately, this lead to disagreements about how the research should have been handled and it focused more on the data than actually helping Genie through the effects of her abuse. Another reason that was problematic to discovering if Lenneberg’s hypothesis was true with Genie was that the researchers did not know if Genie was born with cognitive disabilities or whether her failure to completely correctly comprehend and use the English language was caused by the effects of her prolonged abuse. As the researchers could not answer this, their research was deemed unfounded by the government and the Genie program was