The Chrysalids, by John Wyndham is a great novel in my opinion. It occurs in the future but it focuses on prejudices, intolerance and torture, issues that exist now and will always exist as long as we do. I believe the novel has a very important message for readers today. In the novel, The Chrysalids, and in reality presently, many human rights are being violated. First off, child abuse and torture is a major factor in the novel. Secondly, the intolerance towards the women of Waknuk, and how they are treated. Lastly, the deportation of people to other countries around the world, and other area’s of Labrador.
The first issue that is a major concern in the novel, is the torture and abuse towards David, and other members in the novel. Every minute in the United States, children are physically and sexually abused, murdered, maimed, and emotionally scarred. David, the narrator of the novel, has encountured this abuse more than once. David is tortured numorous times, by his father, Joseph Strorm. This brutality would continue, until Mr. Strorm received the information he demanded. It would continue on for hours, until David could not handle it anymore, until the answers Joseph Strorm wanted, were beaten out of of him.
No child, anywhere in the world, should have to experience such cruelty. Over 67% of children with disabilities are induced by physical abuse. These numbers are very shocking, but what is every more unbelievalbe is the fact that these children are suffering in silence. Today more and more children are being abused, physically, mentally, and even emotionally. The most pitiful part of it all, is that this abuse is being done by the people the childs parents or close relatives, the ones that are supposed to love and nurture the child, not abuse and torture the child.
Another human right being abused in the book, is the intolerance towards the opposite sex. The women of Waknuk, are too familiar with this sitution. Women in Waknuk are not aloud to work outside of the home. The men believe their rightful place to be, is in the home. Cooking, cleaning, having childern, and keeping the house is complete order. This exact thing is happening around the world, even in our own communities today, as we speak. But I believe this intolerance is most severe in a country called, Afghanistan.
Women in this country annot attend school, have no right to work, cannot have male doctors only females attending them, and have even been ordered to stay in the home. But if they do choose to go out, they cannot show their faces in public, go outside the house alone, wear certain clothes, or even wear shoes that make a clicking sound. Women can not walk alone even in their own neighbourhood without the fear of being stopped, beaten or detained particularly by the religious police as suspected moral offenders. This is because there are more constraints placed on the behaviour of women than men.
For instance they are not allowed to go anywhere, or leave the country without a male guardian or his written consent. Lastly, the human right abuse being violated in the novel, is the free will to move in and out of a country, and the will to live where you see fit. In the novel, The Chrysalids, if you are born with the slightest abnormality, deviation, or even a special power, such as Davis and his friends, think shapes, you are sent away, and exiled to the Fringes, as a mutant. If you do not leave immediatly to the Fringers, or return once you have been sent there.
The people of Waknuk have a right to, shoot and even kill you, if you decide to break the rules. This same issue is happening today in many countries around the world. For example, Thai women are being trafficked to Japan. Trafficking people means the illegal and highly profitable recruitment, transport or sale of human beings for the purpose of exploiting their labor. It is a slavery like practice that must be eliminated. The trafficking of women and children into bonded sweatshop labor, forced marriage, forced prostitution, domestic servitude, and other kinds of work is a global phenomenon.
Traffickers use coercive tactics including deception, fraud, intimidation, isolation, threat and use of physical force, or debt bondage to control their victim. Also, as I said earlier, the women in Afghanistan, cannot leave the country with out a male guardian or his written consent. The novel, The Chrysalids, by John Wyndam, as you can tell, has many human rights abuses. I have only explained a few of these abuses in the novel, but their are considerably more in the book.
Unforuntly all these abuses will continue to reoccur, in our world, as long as we are around. Even when people are the same race or the same religion there is prejudices, intolerance and torture. If you do not act or look a certain way, you are deemed different. To be different is to be hated. To be different is to feel inferior to those who deem themselves normal. What people don’t realize is that we are supposed to be different. We are not supposed to be mirror images of each other. If that were to happen, what kind of world would we be living in today?
