It's an extraordinary story a little girl neglected rejected abandoned by her parents
For comfort she snuggles up in the farmyard kennels with the dogs. That becomes her home
They become her family for the next six years
They protect her feed her maybe even love her and in return she begins to act like them
It's a remarkable case one that startled the world of science
Especially when the doctors tried to teach her to be a normal child
in fact the film you're about to see
Reignites the whole nature versus nurture debate and it could make you think twice about the way we bring up our kids
At first this looks like some kind of strange hoax
Ukrainian girl Oksana Malaya running jumping eating and barking just like a dog
But this is no fraud
Oksana's behavior is the result of the most cruel childhood neglect neglect that began when she was three
Mum had too many kids we didn't have enough beds. So I crawled to the dog and started living with her
Her parents were alcoholics and one night too drunk to care. They left their infant daughter outside in the cold
Looking for warmth Oksana crawled into the farm kennel curling up with the mongrel dogs. Probably saved her life. I
Would talk to them they would bark and I would repeat it. That was our way of communication
The next six years from the age of three to eight the kennel was Oksana's home and the dogs her family
She had very little human contact and when finally discovered it was obvious, they'd been catastrophic
consequences for Oksana's development
She was more like a little dog than a human child
Your worship refused to show a tongue that she's so water and she used to eat with the tongue and not her hands
Oxana is now 22 and lives in a special care home
Remarkably, she is able to speak able to communicate some feelings and that some progress
Well, I remember her when she was initially brought here. She wasn't like a human being she was like a small animal
About half a year later. She had completely changed
But certain situations still trigger deeply ingrained responses
When I feel lonely, I find myself doing anything I call on all fours. This is how lonely I am
Because I have nobody I spend my time with dogs I go for walks and do anything. I want to
Nobody notices that I crawl on all fours
When we're talking about how does a child learn to live with dogs
There's obviously no deal and such but this give and take so the dogs are giving
their love their attention their acceptance in a sense
And what the child must give is that they've got to learn to adapt to the dog?
Situation and if that means eating raw meat and scavenging a rubbish tip
That's what they're going to have to learn to do because otherwise they're not going to survive
I'd like you to ask Oksana if this house is a particular place she knows
using drawings child psychologist Lynn fry
tries to determine what damage the years spent with dogs have done to Oksana's intellectual and social development a
drawing of a person has always been taken as quite a good judge of
Basic ability if you like and her drawing was very similar to you would expect from a six-year-old
Cognitive tests also show this 22 year old has the mental age of a 5 or 6 year old and
Because Oksana missed out on so much human contact during her early years
She also missed out on the chance to learn basic human skills
Psychologists believe she'll never be able to catch up. I
Don't think that she's ever going to learn to read or do anything else there?
That's that's going to be useful not now because I suspect she was reluctant to learn that in the first place
Cases like Oksana Malaya provide extraordinary opportunities for scientists
Opportunities that could never otherwise be replicated because of their cruelty in this day and age
Experimenting on newborn babies is obviously unknown
So the so-called feral children are like little bit an experiment. They give us an insight into the age-old debate
Nature versus nurture are we a product of our genes or are we a product of our experiences?
Back in the 1930s
they weren't the same ethical concerns about children and
American scientists Winthrop Kellogg used his own 18 month-old son Donald in an experiment with the chimpanzee
The idea was that by spending lots of time together every day
the chimpanzee would take on human characteristics learnt from the child and
That happened but unexpectedly the child also began barking and yelping like the chimp mimicking it
by accident
Kellogg had shown the vulnerability of early childhood how infants adapt to changes in their environment
The question that's always been asked by people who have studied these children in the past
It's about what does it really mean to be human?
we look at the development of language what happens if you don't get language up to a critical period and that critical period is
I think now generally accepted that if you haven't got language by about five, you're not going to get language at all
Officials have taken custody of a 13 year old girl
And they say was kept in such isolation by her parents that she never even learned to talk
Perhaps most inexplicable of all these feral children is Janie Wylie found not in some poverty-stricken
third-world country
but right in the heart of middle-class, Los Angeles
The girl still wore diapers and was uttering infantile noises the social worker discovered the case two weeks ago
But the authorities are hoping she still may have a normal learning capacity for the first 13 years of her life
Jeannie endured almost total sensory and social deprivation
Isolated in her bedroom by day. She was strapped onto a potty chair by night chained to her bed
Detective Franklin Lee was one of the first people to say her when she was discovered in
1970 a child duck obviously had been
Severely mistreated after she was still in diapers couldn't walk. She had no verbal skills at all at that point
It was Janie's dominating and mentally unstable father Clark Wiley who cut his daughter off from the world
Even from her own mother and brother
Jeannie had never learned to speak so scientists. Wondered if she could ever be taught
Looked after in foster care. She also became a living experiment for linguists like Susan Curtis
she was
Extremely interested in everything around her. She wanted to know the word for everything around her
She wanted to engage people all around her
she was not mentally deficient her lights were on and everyone who worked with her from teachers to
Therapists to me knew that she was not retarded
The conventional thinking was that language would be impossible but early on Jeannie
confounded the scientists as she began to learn more more words hundreds of words much more rapidly than
I ever imagined and swinging them together. I began to think maybe I will be wrong
Maybe she will be the one that will prove that this hypothesis is incorrect
But then things changed for the worse haunted by her traumatic upbringing Janie's development stopped
She learned tons of words. She has an enormous vocabulary
But language is not words language is grammar
languages
sentences
How do you make a sentence what can be a sentence?
Ingenious brain the left part of her her brain
They her cortex that that has those neural systems responsible for speech and language at 18 Janey Wiley's life
Took another strange and tragic twist
She left the care of foster parents and moved back in with her mother back into the house where she'd endured 13 years of neglect
People wouldn't listen to me people who needed to intervene did not listen to me
And so I spent lots and lots of time on the phone pleading with people to intervene and save this
person who had had the worst
experience of deprivation and isolation in all the Kurdish medical history who was now in a
crisis situation
as
You'd expect her condition quickly deteriorated
Her mother couldn't cope and Jeanie was put into an institution
she was also lost to science a court order stopping people like Susan Curtis going anywhere near her I
Went from being asked to be her guardian
- one week later being prevented from seeing her or phoning her and ever since then I've been
Prevented from having any contact at all
Janey's almost 50 now. She's still
Institutionalized and still not allowed contact with the scientists. Her present condition is unknown
We are continuing to learn more and more about how to help these children more and more about how these
neglectful experiences influence their brain, but we're just on the
very very very cusp of
Being able to be helpful because to date we haven't done a very good job with that
We just haven't understood the brain of brain development in ways
That would allow us to be as good as we can be and I think that that's changing
Why feral children like Jeanne would ever want to be reunited with their parents is perhaps explained in the
1960s experiments of notorious psychologist Harry Harlow
he took newborn monkeys from their mothers and gave them a choice between a cold wire surrogate with milk or a
Soft warm surrogate without they chose comfort above food every time
So maybe we've been hardwired to expect comfort from our biological parents no matter what they do to us
parlors work was really seminal in this entire field because he showed the crucial importance of the caregiving relationship between
a mother and an infant and how the physical stimulation literally the physical contact
with the caregiver has
profound impact on health and development
That same desire burns in Oxana
14 years after being freed from her parents appalling Cruelty
She's made some remarkable advances her speaking and language are far better than her caregivers ever imagined possible
Now she makes the decision she wants to find and meet her mother and father I
Want to see them with my own eyes so desperately because I've been told I have no parents, but actually I do have
Her mother has long since disappeared but her father Alexander agrees to a reunion
He leaves his farm and makes a 350 kilometres. Ernie - Oksana and
There's another surprise
For support he brings along Mina Oksana's half-sister. She didn't even know existed
It's an awkward meeting a first father and daughter just stand there staring at each other
Then a few tentative steps closer
Even was video
The villa mining trail we are live in like a rough
You know Gotama is just divine
For these children because they have not had the experiences that help their brain
Organize systems to make sense of the world the world never makes sense
Despite all the suffering and the damage it's done to her brain
Oksana does have an undeniable spirit and the truly remarkable
human gift of forgiveness
We should look at these children not with pity. But with awe, I mean they're just
It's fascinating
That you could go through something like that and that you would still be willing
After what human beings have done to you that you'd still be willing to put your hand out and touch a new person
Hello, I'm Tara Brown thanks for watching to keep up with the latest from 60 minutes, Australia
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