It has been said repeatedly throughout the ages that the love of a parent for a child is the most precious thing in the world.
The hard truth is that there are abusive parents whose conducts toward their kids are no better than strangers’. It is as if the importance of nurturing has wholly been lost on them.
In the 1960s, the experiment conducted by an American psychologist Harry Harlow – as controversial and condemned as it was – provided yet another evidence that abandonment or severe lack of interaction would obliterate every aspect of a person’s social behaviors.
All primates, including humans, require comfort nearly as much as they need food. This brings us to the story of Danielle Crocket, a feral child.
In 2005, the 6-year-old girl was spotted by a neighbor peeking from a broken window inside her family’s home.
When the authorities came to check, she was found lying on the floor, almost lifeless.
Her mother and brothers practically abandoned the girl in a room the size of a closet. She had been deprived to the bone of interaction and parental care.
10 /10 Everything Rotting
In the summer of 2005, when a Plant City Detective Mark Holste came for a welfare check following a report from a resident living at the Old Sydney Road concerning the appearance of a strange-looking girl from inside a neighbor’s window, he had been on the force for 18 years.
Upon entering the house in the address informed by the caller, his nose sensed a smell so disturbing, worse even when compared to a room with rotting dead bodies.
Not just the smell; the walls were all smeared with human excrement, and he couldn’t walk without stepping on German cockroaches.
9 /10 Child Abuse Report
He was there to respond to a report of child abuse on July 13. The first people he came across were a mother dressed in a housecoat with her two sons.
He didn’t see the girl that the caller claimed to have spotted in the house. Detective Holste kept on walking and reached a door down the narrow hall.
A turn on the handle revealed a room comparable in size to a walk-in closet.
After some steps, he felt something moved at his feet. He looked down, and the girl was staring back at him, unblinking and unfocused.