Officials cast doubt on tale of girl raised by monkeys
The Jungle Book-like tale of a girl said to have been found living with monkeys in an Indian forest was shocking, disturbing and fascinating.
It might also have been untrue.
The girl, according to news reports, was rescued this year by police who found her surrounded by monkeys in the northern state of Uttar Pradesh.
One police officer speculated that she might have been raised by primates from infancy. She has since been living at a hospital in the city of Bahraich, where the chief medical officer said she arrived crawling, eating and screeching like an animal.
But other officials cast doubt on some of those details over the weekend.
JP Singh, district chief forestry officer in the Katarniya Ghat area, told The Guardian that the girl was located on a roadside, not in the forest.
Sarbajeet Yadav, a police constable who participated in the rescue, told the Hindustan Times that “there were no monkeys around.”
What’s more, cameras in the area — used for security and animal-tracking purposes — would have detected the girl had she been there, officials said.
Officials involved in helping the girl stressed from the start that they were not certain how long she had been living outdoors, and they said they were scouring missing children reports in an attempt to identify her.
But Singh said that he suspected the girl’s inability to communicate was the result of a disability, not a childhood among monkeys, and that she had been recently abandoned by relatives who did not want to care for her. Her age is unknown.
“It is clear from first time view, if you see the girl, that she is only eight or nine years old, but her facial expressions show that she is disabled, not only mentally but also physically,” he said.
The hospital’s chief medical officer, DK Singh, echoed that, and said the girl might also have been cast off due to another perceived handicap: being a girl in a society that prizes boys.
“Some families value girls less than boys,” Ranjana Kumari, an advocate for girls, told The Guardian. “They would rather get rid of the girl than spend money on her. It is a lot more responsibility because of the social environment we live in.”