Editor’s Corner
November 7, 2008
The peeping public and lost children
By
Andrea Pitzer
In recent months, we’ve received submissions about children betrayed by their parents, forgotten by their neighbors, or failed by social services. “Feral” children, such as Dani Lierow in November’s Notable Narrative, have a long history in journalism—a history that often reflects badly on those recording it as well as those ostensibly saving the child.
A case in point: nearly two hundred years ago, a teenage Kaspar Hauser appeared on a street corner in Nuremberg. He eventually revealed years of imprisonment in a small room with a straw pallet and a wooden rocking horse. The press of the day took part in rampant speculation that Hauser was the abandoned love child of a royal family, and more than a century later, Werner Herzog committed his story to film in Jeder für sich und Gott gegen alle (“Every man for himself and God against them all”). But Hauser’s feral nature, as well as the veracity of his account of his early years, have been in doubt since the beginning and continue to be questioned by contemporary historians and mental health experts.
Both the facts and the inventions of the Hauser story have inspired fictional authors, from Paul Verlaine to Herman Melville and Steven Millhauser. The image of the wild child striving to enter society caught the public’s fancy, and it survives in journalism because of the larger issue these stories address: What does it mean to be human?
More recent feral children have proved no less captivating. Russ Rymer’s Genie—A Scientific Tragedy narrates the 1970 discovery of Genie, who was isolated, neglected, and abused from infancy to puberty in Arcadia, California. Rymer looked not only at Genie’s history, but at what science had to say about her condition and what the people charged with her care ended up doing to her—a shattering of the simple “before” and “after” paradigm for reporting the lives of these children.
In spring of this year, a number of papers chronicled Austria’s monstrous Josef Fritzl, who kidnapped his own daughter and kept her imprisoned for more than two decades in his bulwarked basement, where he repeatedly raped her and she bore child after child. While narrative journalism aims to address the big picture—which serves as the only excuse for the otherwise prurient examination of these traumas—reporters must walk a fine line. Drawing parallels between Anschluss-era Nazi sympathizers and contemporary Austrian child abuse, one Times of London article quoted novelist Josef Haslinger: “The Austrian character has a hidden, dark side. If we talk about it so much in our art, there must be something there in reality.” Serious reportorial legwork involves more than finding sources willing to give incendiary quotes, or quotes that suggest one nation embodies a flaw that ignores abuse.
In this month’s story, Dani Lierow receives responsible attention. The final lines of the piece move between the sentimentality of a father’s embrace and the totality of Dani’s devastation: “She has learned to look at people and let herself be held. She can chew ham… She knows her name is Dani.” To know her name, to have enough to eat, even to be able to eat at all, the author shows us, may be as much as Dani can recover from what has been lost.
Feral children are tempting subjects, in part because they can serve as inadvertently blank slates on which journalists project one version of a story. But the history of mistreatment and their ongoing vulnerability suggest restraint and a higher level of accountability to such children. Reporters can’t settle for any convenient narrative.