Anna (feral child)

Alice Marie Harris (March 6, 1932 – August 6, 1942), known under the pseudonym Anna, was a feral child from Pennsylvania who was raised in isolation because she was an illegitimate child. From the age of five months to six years, she was kept strapped down in the attic of her home, malnourished and unable to speak or move. She was discovered and rescued in 1938, but died at the age of ten before she was able to fully recover from hemorrhagic jaundice. Anna is often compared to the feral children cases of Isabelle and Genie.

Anna
Born	Alice Marie Harris March 6, 1932 Perryopolis, Pennsylvania
Died	August 6, 1942 (aged 10)
Cause of death	Hemorrhagic jaundice

Family

Anna was born March 6, 1932, In Perryopolis, Pennsylvania, about 17 miles (27 km) outside of Uniontown.[1][2][3] She was the second illegitimate child of her mother, Martha Harris, who was 27 at the time of Anna's discovery. She lived with Anna's grandfather, David Harris, a widowed farmer who strongly disapproved of her mother's indiscretions. After Anna was found, Martha married a man by the name of George I. Eisenhauer. Martha died in Philadelphia in 1959. David Harris died at the age of 72 in 1948. He was the son of the late Jacob and Catherine Cochran Harris. His children included daughters Martha and Catherine Elwell and sons Jacob and Harold.

Early life

Anna was born in a nurse's private home and was brought to the family farm, but shortly after was sent to live at her mother's friend's house. A local minister considered adopting Anna, but decided against it when he discovered she had vaginitis.[1] At the age of three weeks, Anna was sent to live in a children's home. There, she was said to be "terribly galled and otherwise in very bad shape".[4] After eight weeks in the home, Anna's mother was called to come collect her. In her place, she sent a man and his wife to see Anna in hopes of adopting her, but the agency refused to give permission because they disapproved of the couple. Later, the mother came herself and gave Anna to the couple. A short time after, a social worker found Anna at this home and attempted to convince her mother and grandfather to take her back. At this time, Anna was over four months old. She was taken to another children's home where a medical examination revealed she had vaginitis, umbilical hernia, and a skin rash. Anna was sent to a private foster home after three weeks in the children's home.[1]

Due to the fact that the mother and the grandfather could not pay for the child's care, she was sent back to live on the family farm at the age of five and a half months. In an attempt to avoid her father's anger, Martha kept her in an attic-like room on the second floor. Her mother was busy working on the farm during the day and occasionally went out at night. Anna was given only enough care to keep her alive and received no instruction or positive attention. She was fed virtually nothing else except for cow's milk and was strapped down to a chair or a cot for the majority of her early life. An article in the New York Times stated that Anna had been kept in the attic room, which was without windows or ventilation, for two years, and then kept for three years more in the storage room in the second floor. However, a later report in the American Journal of Sociology by Kingsley Davis considers it “doubtful that the child's hands at the time of discovery were tied. It is more likely that she was confined to her crib in the first period of life and at all times kept locked in her room to keep her from falling down the steep stairs leading immediately from the door and to keep the grandfather from seeing her. It is doubtful if the child was ever kept in the attic, as the report also stated”.[1]

When interviewed by officers, David Harris was quoted saying: "I made her keep it up there, care for it and feed it as a sort of punishment. I forgave her first [illegitimate child], but not the second".[3] The same New York Times article quotes Martha: "My father wouldn't let me bring it downstairs. He said he didn't want to see it around. I had to run up and down, up and down, to feed and take care of it. I had to feed it all the time. It was awfully hard".[3] The name of the father was withheld, but Martha said the girl's father was a well-to-do farmer.

Rescue

Anna was discovered around February 6, 1938 by E. M. Smith of the Western Pennsylvania Humane Society about seventeen miles from Uniontown, Pennsylvania.[3] The humane officer found the child after a report had been filed from the Woman's Club of Star Junction. Other reports had also been spread that a child was kept in the house, yet she was never seen by visitors. When Anna was found, the Humane officer reported that: "The child was dressed in a dirty shirt and napkin. Her hands, arms and legs were just bones, with skin drawn over them, so frail she couldn't use them. She never grew normally, and the chair on which she lay, half reclining and half sitting was so small the child had to double her legs partly under her".[3] The chair that she was found in was tilted backwards to lean on a coal bucket with her arms tied above her head, leaving her unable to talk or move. Charges of negligence to a minor were brought up against Harris and Martha. The grandfather was freed after Judge J. Russell Carr dismissed the case for lack of evidence.[2] Dr John Kerr of Connellsville testified at the trial. He declared: "it was about the most deplorable condition I have ever seen in all those years".[2] He testified she had a severe lack of muscle, abnormal bones, and that she couldn't see or hear. He believed that, had she been properly nourished, she would have been a "normal" child. Martha, her mother, claimed that she tried feeding her child meat and other solid foods but that they made her gag. She denied the statements that the child had been kept imprisoned in an attic.[2]

Recovery

When Anna was first rescued, Drs. J. F. Kerr and D. F. Newell assessed that she was undernourished, that the bones in her legs were softened and twisted out of normal shape and that she was suffering from rickets.[3] She was also believed to be deaf as she didn't respond to others. It was later discovered as she recovered that the deafness was organic rather than functional. She additionally could not walk, talk, and showed little signs of intelligence. Once she was determined a ward of the county and placed in the Fayette County Home, Anna began improving rapidly. She had gained seven pounds by the end of the summer in 1938 but continued to struggle with simple speech and walking. She was enrolled in the Margaret Duer Judge school for "sub-normal" children.[2] By the age of 9, she began developing signs of speech and was approaching social norms. She could respond to simple commands, feed herself, and remember some people, but she still could not speak, and had the approximate intelligence of a 1-year-old child.

A report filed in November 6, 1939 describes her state as follows: "Anna walks about aimlessly, makes periodic rhythmic motions of her hands, and, at intervals, makes guttural and sucking noises. She regards her hands as if she had seen them for the first time. It was impossible to hold her attention for more than a few seconds at a time-not because of distraction due to external stimuli but because of her inability to concentrate. She ignored the task in hand to gaze vacantly about the room. Speech is entirely lacking. Numerous unsuccessful attempts have been made with her in the hope of developing initial sounds. I do not believe that this failure is due to negativism or deafness but that she is not sufficiently developed to accept speech at this time .... The prognosis is not favorable". Her teachers described her as having a pleasant disposition, but unfortunately, Anna died soon after.

Death

After a life of just over ten years, Anna died on August 6, 1942.[4] Her death was caused by hemorrhagic jaundice, a form of jaundice in which injury and anemia are present.[5][6] There is no cited evidence that her condition was linked to her isolation. The Fayette County commissioners paid for the funeral and burial of Anna in Delaware Cemetery, near the Judge School in Milford where she had last lived.

Comparisons to other cases

Anna's case is commonly compared to the study of another feral child, Isabelle, because of their similar upbringings. Anna and Isabelle were both raised in isolation for a similar amount of time, but Isabelle was able to recover much faster and achieve greater mental development.[4] Isabelle was born one month after Anna and was discovered nine months after Anna. Similarly to Anna, Isabelle was forced into isolation because she was an illegitimate child. During her six and a half years of isolation, Isabelle lived with her deaf and mute mother. She had no concept of relationships, no verbal skills, and was malnourished. Following Isabelle's discovery, she was hospitalized and her apathetic behavior was closely monitored. She was then transferred to a ward with children where she became socialized and learned to imitate the other children. She also began language training with a skilled team of doctors and within eighteen months had gained the understanding and use of an estimated 1500–2500 words, enabling her to produce complex sentences and correctly use inflection morphology, pronouns, and prepositions by the age of eight.[7]

As soon as a year and a half after her discovery, Isabelle was energetic and fully mobile. By fourteen, she was excelling in public school.[4] The recovery of Isabelle is clearly different than Anna. In both cases they had very low intellectual abilities when they were discovered and introduced into the world. Their differences arise, however, when one considers that two years after Isabelle's discovery she was deemed to be recovered and a fully functioning girl, but prior to Anna's death she only ever reached the level of socialization of a two or three-year-old child.[8] The varying recovery between Anna and Isabelle is suspected to be the result of Anna having less initial mental capacity prior to isolation or to her receiving a lesser standard of care and verbal training during her recovery than Isabelle's team of skilled doctors and physiologists offered her.[1][8] Some also account Isabelle's recovery to the fact that she was in isolation with her mother.[8] However, the exact reason is hard to pinpoint because Anna died at the age of ten before this could be investigated any further.

Another case Anna is commonly compared to is feral child Genie. While growing up, Genie's father became convinced that Genie was severely mentally retarded, causing him to withhold from her care and attention. At approximately the time she reached the age of 20 months, this belief of Genie's father caused him to keep her as socially isolated as possible and until she reached the age of 13 years and 7 months he kept her locked alone in a room. During this time, Genie was strapped to a child's toilet or bound in her crib. This caused Genie's arms and legs to remain completely immobilized. Her father forbade anyone from interacting with her, provided her with almost no stimulation of any kind, and left her severely malnourished and unable to mobilize.[9] The extent of her isolation prevented her from being exposed to any significant amount of speech or human interaction, and as a result she did not acquire language during her childhood, similar to Anna. Her abuse came to the attention of Los Angeles child welfare authorities on November 4, 1970 and this caused a media frenzy.[10]

Following her discovery, Genie was followed by scientists, physiologists, and linguists. Genie has lived much longer than Anna and is believed to be 60 or 61 years old (as of 2017), but she has yet to acquire a functional first language. Unlike Anna, psychologists and linguists continue to frequently discuss Genie to this day, and there is considerable academic and media interest in her development and the research team's methods, since Genie's case has demonstrated the necessity of early language stimulation in the left hemisphere of the brain to start.[9] The discoveries made through Genie's following and scientific testing relate to Anna because it explains that Anna's lack of language stimulation during her isolated childhood are the basis for why she was never able to acquire the verbal communication skills expected of her age up until the time of her early death. Her death was most likely linked to her isolation earlier in her life.

Ethical dispute

The difficulty in treating feral children cases like Anna is that the line between care and therapy is blurred. As seen with Genie's case, putting scientific advancement over her personal care is a pitfall that all scientists were guilty of to some degree. Families that had no background in abused child psychology were not equipped to care for her, and scientists that were equipped also were invested in researching how to better treat future children. Additionally Paul Lutus argues that psychology is not a real science because the outcome is not determined by the treatment. And all successes become research somewhere down the line.[11] This is especially true in any feral child case as there is no ethical way to perform social isolation experiments on children to the extent of someone like Anna. Psychological treatment relies on a code that ensures professionalism and quality care necessary to gain the trust of the child. The goal is to support the patient so that they can pursue development and autonomy while the psychologist resists potentially controlling or coercing compliance. Treating feral children is understandably difficult as they have little to no means of communication, and are ineffective at communicating wants and desires in a meaningful way. Ethics comes into dispute when the line between teaching and parenting becomes thin.

References

1. Davis, K. (1940). "Extreme Social Isolation of Child". American Journal of Sociology. 45 (4): 554–565. doi:10.1086/218374. JSTOR 2770265. S2CID 71859389.
2. "The Evening Standard from Uniontown, Pennsylvania on March 15, 1938 · Page 3". Newspapers.com. Retrieved 2017-12-04.
3. "CHILD OF 5 FOUND PRISONER IN CHAIR". New York Times. February 6, 1938.
4. Davis, K. (1947). "Final Note on a Case of Extreme Isolation". American Journal of Sociology. 52 (5): 432–447. doi:10.1086/220036. JSTOR 2770825. PMID 20286765. S2CID 7559219.
5. "Jaundice: Causes, symptoms, and treatments". Medical News Today. Retrieved 2017-11-17.
6. "hemorrhagic jaundice". TheFreeDictionary.com. Retrieved 2017-11-17.
7. Tartter, V. C. (1998). Language Processing in Atypical Populations. California: SAGE publications. p. 113.
8. 1944-, Robertson, Ian (1989). Society : a brief introduction. New York, N.Y.: Worth Publishers. ISBN 9780879014124. OCLC 19920827.CS1 maint: numeric names: authors list (link)
9. Curtiss, Susan (1974). The Development of Language in Genie: a Case of Language Acquisition Beyond the "Critical Period". Los Angeles, CA.
10. Reynolds, Cecil R (2004). Concise Encyclopedia of Special Education: A Reference for the Education of the Handicapped and Other Exceptional Children and Adults. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons. pp. 428–429. ISBN 9780471652519.
11. Lutus, Paul. "Psychology and Neuroscience". www.arachnoid.com. Retrieved 2017-12-01.