Abstract:
Chitra Fernando is the most prominent and important writer and
critic in Sri Lankan English fiction. One of her major works include the short
story ‘Action and reaction’ from her short story collection ‘Three women’(1984).
It is necessary to bring her short stories which contain various social problems
as the contents into the area of research. Her short stories can be analyzed in
different perspectives. Hence, this study was conducted based on Chitra
Fernando’s short story “Action and Reaction” from her short story collection
‘Three women’. Main objective of this research is identifying the challenges
and issues related to adoption and child labour in the story. One of the research
questions of this article is why children from poor families are adopted by the
adopters in order to meet their needs and the other question is how the
adopted children are used as child workers under these adopters and act
according to their demand and orders. The third question of this research is
what the mental and social problems are those adopted child labourers face
eventually when they grow up. In this research, the short story “Action and
Reaction” has been used as the primary data source. books, research journals
and websites related to the study have been used as secondary data too. A
sociological and rights-based approach has been applied for the textual
analysis of the story. As a result, psychology, physical and social challenges
related to adoption and child labour faced by the character ‘kusuma’ – the child
labourer of this short story were found and discussed in this study. Therefore,
it is recommended that policies that are made for fighting against adopting
children illegally and engaging them as child labourers should be
implemented.
