ACHIEVING HUMAN RIGHTS

THROUGH SOCIAL WORK PRACTICE

DALMACE, RAMONETTE B.

THEORETICAL FOUNDATIONS

PRAXIS: “We learn by doing and we do by learning”The idea of ‘praxis’ (Freire 1996) is that theory and practice, or learningand doing, cannot be separated. It is through theory/reflection that wedevelop practice/action, and at the same time it is through practice/actionthat we develop theory/reflection.

Praxis is therefore about both knowledge and action; knowledge withoutaction would be sterile, ungrounded and irrelevant, and action withoutknowledge is anti-intellectual, uninformed and usually dangerous. Socialwork, however, has frequently seen theory and practice as separate (Pease& Fook 1999),

The praxis orientation also means that there can be no clear separationbetween social work education and social work practice.

MORALITYSocial workers make difficult moral judgements, which are often couched in terms of ‘ethics’ or ‘values’ but which require some form of moral reasoning.

The discursive nature of human rights enables a social worker to move away from the traps of moral absolutism, where ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ are clearly spelled out in an unchangeable moral code, and to feel more comfortable in the less certain world of postmodernity.

A human rights perspective also requires thata social worker not just make decisions in isolation purely on the basis of‘what seems right at the time’ – this is the lonely existential decision ofBauman’s postmodern ethics (Bauman 1993).

MORALITYThe social worker is a moral agent, but because of the very nature of socialwork, not a lonely, isolated one. It is in a social worker’s capacity to engageother actors in moral decision-making that the social worker’s effectivenessas a human rights worker can be judged.

PASSIONSocial work is driven not only by careful analysis (important and necessary though that is) but also by a passion to make the world a better place, an outrage at injustice and oppression, and a commitment to change.

Social work that is based on human rights must thus find a place for thepassion that inevitably goes with ideas of human rights. The idea

thereforeof a social worker as a detached professional ‘intervening in systems’

(Pincus & Minahan 1976; Compton & Galaway 1999)

PASSIONSocial workers need not feel guilty about feeling passionate about the cause of human rights, or outraged at the continued violation of human rights that is evident to them every day in their practice.

The task for social workers is not to deny the passion andthe rage but to channel them into effective action that makes a difference.

Maintaining a passion is therefore an important part of human rightsbasedsocial work. But it is often too easy for the passion to fade, as thetask seems just too hard and as the organisational demands of social workpractice take over more of the worker’s available energy

IDEOLOGYwe not only have rights we can claim and exercise, but we have an obligation to exercise those rights and to ensure that the rights of others are fully realised (Stapleton 1995).

Human rights-based social work is therefore inevitably political social work, committing a social worker to an ideological position that incorporates at least some degree of collectivism and a strong role for the public sector, in whatever form this sector may take as a result of globalisation.

Human rights workers are political workers, and human rights, in the broad sense, require a political commitment. Politics and ideological critique therefore need to be part and parcel of social work practice.

HISTORY1. historical perspective is important for emphasising that things

can and do change.2. the study of history can be seen as the study of the struggle

for human rights, which gives an extra immediacy to the human rightsissues of the present.

3. relates to the need to deconstruct the western Enlightenment tradition within which the human rights discourse was framed and which hasso limited the understanding of human rights and has led to the criticismof a human rights discourse as being a discourse of western domination.

4. fourth reason for the importance of history is the extension of theidea of human rights to issues of intergenerational justice.

STRUCTURAL DISADVANTAGEUnderstanding why human rights are not defined, realised or protected formany people requires an analysis of structural oppression or disadvantage.This must be at the basis of all human rights-based social work. Individualaccounts of disadvantage, though an important part of social workers’understandings of particular people and their problems, are insufficient toExplain

It is necessary to have strong analyses of oppression on the basis of class, race, gender, sexuality, nationality, disability, culture and age.

All social work must therefore incorporate multidimensional analysesof structural disadvantage, and this must be at the forefront of socialwork thinking, at whatever level the social worker is practising

Structural inequality and oppression are the context within which social workers practise, and if they do not deliberately seek to be part of the solution, their practice will inevitably become part of the problem.

POSTMODERNISM AND POST-STRUCTURALISMPostmodernism helps social work to move away from the single narrative and the obsession with one ‘right’ answer for any problem towards a view that values multiple voices and allows for the construction of different meanings and multiple Realities

Postmodernism accepts ambiguity, and celebrates diversity, rather than trying to bring everything together in a ‘coherent framework’.

Social work, therefore, requires intellectual effort. It is not simply a case of learning how to do it and then applying principles in a mechanistic manner, nor is it a case of rejecting theory as ‘not part of the real world’ and therefore adoptingan atheoretical (and anti-intellectual) stance. Rather, it requires a constantengagement with both the intellectual and the practical, testing each againstthe other in a constant process of action/reflection, or praxis.

ANTI-COLONIALIST PRACTICEcolonialist practice implies any form of practice that assumes the practitioner is coming from a position of superiority, where the world-view of the practitioner is thereby imposed on others, and where practice serves to promote the interests and needs of the practitioner rather than those with whom the practitioner is working (Ife 2002).

Colonialism in social work can be subtle and insidious, andmany practitioners are not aware of the colonialist implications of theirpractice.Other groups, however, are well aware of such colonialism; indigenous peoplepeople with disabilities, people from cultural,ethnic and racial minorities, and almost any other ‘client group’ have foundtheir genuine lived experiences ‘colonised’ and devalued by mainstream professional practice (whether of social workers or others)

Weakness: lack of awareness by social workers of the processes and experience of colonialism (Said 1993, 1995)

Social workers who are concerned with practising from a human rights perspective need therefore to work consciously to counter the effects of colonialism, and not to practise from a colonialist position.

Key element in anti-colonialist practice is to listen particularly to thevoices of the most oppressed victims of colonialism, namely Indigenous People

an important part of social work practice must be to make sure that the voices of Indigenous People are validated and heard not only in human rights and social work discourse but in the broader society, so that the issue of colonialism remains firmly on the public agenda (Hazlehurst 1995).

FEMINISMstructural or poststructural feminism is a necessarycomponent of the critique of the dominating and oppressive patriarchalstructures and discourses that deny human rights and yet are so muchpart of the organisations and the societies in which social workers practise.

Feminism is thus an essential component of social work education andpraxis, if social work is to be based on a human rights perspective. Asocial worker should therefore ensure that a feminist analysis is part ofthe process of assessment and analysis (undertaken in partnership withthe client as part of dialogical praxis), and that feminist forms of practice,challenging patriarchal structures and processes, are applied in all socialwork settings.

Social work and feminism have a common concern with linking the personal and the political – making the personal political, and the political personal –and hence social work’s incorporation of feminism is both natural andinevitable (Van Den Bergh & Cooper 1986; Dominelli & McLeod 1989;Lee 1994).

NON-VIOLENCENon-violence rests on a rejection of the distinctionbetween means and ends, and a refusal to accept that violent means can be justified in order to meet non-violent ends.

The principle of nonviolenceis that means and ends cannot be separated in this way, and thatto use violent means to reach non-violent ends will corrupt the ends andwill not achieve the desired outcome (Fay 1975).

Gandhi, the best-known advocate and practitioner of non-violence,sought always to value the humanity of those who opposed him, to allowthem to exit from a conflict situation with their dignity intact, to be inclusiverather than exclusive, and to use methods which were non-violentin the broadest sense of the term (Gandhi 1964).

In order to practise non-violence, a social worker needs to be aware ofstructures and processes that can be described as violent and must preventher/his praxis being appropriated by them, as well as seeking to confrontthose violent structures and processes to establish non-violent alternatives

RESEARCHsocial work research has encompassed a wide variety of designs and methodologies: assessing needs, evaluating practice, documenting the inadequacies of the welfare state, collecting data about social problems, seeking to understand the experiences of the people with whom social workers work, exploring the dilemmas and contradictions of practice, and so on (Fook 1996).

From a human rights perspective, social work research needs to address a human rights agenda, and this can involve a number of different researchapproaches:

-specifically identifying individuals and groups whose rights have beenviolated or denied -documenting the nature and extent of human rights abuses -providing information for people to be able to articulate the need forvarious human rights to be met -providing a mechanism for the voices of the disadvantaged (i.e. thosewhose human rights have been denied) to be heard -evaluating policies and programs in terms of their adequacy in meetinghuman rights.

THE PERSONAL AND THE POLITICALThe link between the personal and the political is central to social work:understanding the personal in terms of the political, understanding thepolitical in terms of the personal, and acting to bring about change atboth levels (Van Den Bergh & Cooper 1986; Dominelli &McLeod 1989;Fook 1993)

They are personal because they affect persona lwell-being, security,survival and self-actualisation, representing as they do a series of statementson what it means to be human.

they are political because human rightsare about power and its distribution, about how power is constructed andenacted, about who has and should have the rights to exercise power, and inwhat circumstances.

social workers must always be articulating the political aspects of the personal and the personal aspects of the political.

E,g unemployed

It is important that social workers insist on an understanding of human rights that extends to the private as well as the public arena, and that they seek to break down the private/public dichotomy which has effectively prevented the pursuit of human rights in the private sphere, because it is seen as ‘no business of the state’.