If there is a feral kid they have left the sphere of what is acceptable. If you drop them out, then you raise the chances of everyone else. If you accept the feral kid, you're moving the needle, the average over. It becomes acceptable for more kids to act like the feral kid.

It's the same as the overton window in politics/news.

also:

Feral children [2002]

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC1279985/

there has been professional recognition of a problem for some time, some lack of rules or guardrails, a deficient degree of socialization during formative years.

its a bigger problem than a "deprogramming" as there is no foundational patterning to recover.