In January 2018 a teenage girl who had been raised in an isolated abusive home made her escape and saved her twelve siblings. After having been physically tortured for years she stole a cellphone from her phone and made a mad dash for freedom, taking one of her siblings with her. This plan to escape had been a process that was two years in the making, and almost fell through when the sibling she took with her was overcame by fear and returned home. When far enough away from her house the girl dialed 911 and told the authorities of the horrors she grew up with: being chained to her bed for prolonged periods of time, starved, sometimes even strangled. She told them that she and her siblings were only allowed to bathe once a year. When the police asked if there were any medications in the home she had no idea what medications were. When the police arrived at the home to rescue the other siblings, some had no knowledge of what a police officer was. The Turpin children, ages 2 to 29, were seemingly uneducated of the real world because they had been forced to live a life in isolation.

Socialization is crucial to the development of an individual as a functioning member of society. Socialization is the process by which a society, culture, or group teaches individuals to become functioning members, and the process by which individuals learn and internalize the values and norms of the group (Ferris and Stein 99). With that being stated, it is clear that the Turpin children suffered from a lack of socialization due to their isolation from the world beyond their home. This lack of socialization will permanently affect the siblings, especially the oldest ones being 29 years old or shortly under. They are adults now and are expected to function in society on a level that they were not exposed to or educated on. The Turpin parents got away with not properly educating their children by registering their home as a private school residence; this drew up no red flags with the authorities and they never went to check it out. The Turpin children are not as extremely deprived as many cases of feral children, such as Genie Wiley, but by definition of feral children being “children who have had little human contact and may have lived in social isolation from a young age”, they would be considered feral (Ferris and Stein 101). The Turpin children had really only had contact with their immediate family members, having never seen a dentist and no doctors visits in roughly four years.

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