Page 14 - Flipbook: Sociology Shortcuts Issue 3

Socialisation

How do we learn how to become competent social actors?

ocialisation is a process that describes Feral children are sociologically significant for
how we are taught the behavioural rules two main reasons:
Swe need to become both members of a
particular society / culture and a competent 1. When children are raised without human
social actor within that society. contact they fail to show the social and
physical development we would expect from a
In other words, for sociologists we are all a conventionally-raised child - walking upright,
product of our nurturing - we do not have talking, using eating implements and so forth.
instincts to guide our behaviour and
development - and one way of demonstrating 2. If human behaviour was instinctive it's not
this idea is through a naturally-occurring form clear why children such as Genie should
of experimentation: unsocialised or feral develop so differently to children raised with
children. human contacts. We would also expect feral
children, once returned to human society, to
Although evidence of human infants raised by quickly pick-up the things we consider normal
animals "in the wild" is rare and not always human behaviours. This, however, is not the
reliable (one exception being Saturday Mifune case.
discovered, aged 5, in 1987 living in a pack of
monkeys in South Africa), evidence of children
raised with little or no human contact is much
more common.

A well-documented example is “Genie”, a 13-year old Californian girl, discovered in 1970.
Pines (1997) notes Genie had been

“isolated in a small room and had not been spoken to by her parents since infancy. She was
malnourished, abused, unloved, bereft of any toys or companionship". The result of this
experience was that, when found "she could not stand erect…she was unable to speak: she
could only whimper”.

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