SHEILA GREENE,
Sir, - I read with interest Katherine Holmquist's article "Wild children", (Weekend, January 26th) based partly on a new book by Michael Newton entitled Savage Girls and Wild Boys: A History of Feral Children.
As Ms Holmquist points out, the phenomenon of the wild child has been a source of fascination and myth-making since the story of Romulus and Remus. However, I would take issue with several of her own conclusions on this topic, especially her view that "no one has yet humanised a brutalised child - as our own prisons full of recidivists show".
This extremely negative conclusion is not substantiated by the research literature on the long-term consequences of severe environmental deprivation. A recent book by Ann and Alan Clarke Early Experience and the Life Course, reviews the evidence on this issue and comes to very different conclusions.
This message from an influential journalist in an influential newspaper is an unfortunate recipe for inaction and fatalism. The example of offenders is particularly inappropriate. Reasons for recidivism are multiple and complex, as are the original causes of offending. The casual assumption that the many recidivist inmates of our jails were all brutalised in infancy is unjustifiable and derogatory.
To stick to the supposed topic of the article: "wild" children are extremely rare. It is likely that many of them were abandoned to the forests or the fields because they were seen to be defective and therefore few conclusions can be drawn from their failure to recover. However, the brutalisation of children does occur.
Such brutalisation can be remedied. There are several, well-documented case studies which show good recovery in catastrophically deprived children. Some of the children in the Romanian orphanages of the 1980s and 1990s could be seen to fall into this category. Where there is no evidence of brain damage, the vast majority of these children, when moved to loving homes, make a remarkable recovery.
The resilience, both intellectual and emotional, of human beings is extraordinary. In relation to the role of adverse early experience in later development, the study of human development has moved well beyond narrow determinism and pessimism. Yours, etc.,
SHEILA GREENE, Children's Research Centre, Trinity College, Dublin 2.