Radically Transforming Human Rights for Social Work Practice Jim Ife (Emeritus Professor, Curtin University, Australia) jimife@iinet.net.au International Social Work Conference, Seoul, June 2016 The last two decades have seen an increased interest in human rights by social workers. The creation of the IFSW Human Rights Commission established an interest in human rights as central to social work s international role, and definitions or descriptions of social work have commonly included reference to human rights. There have been many social work leaders in human rights activism; from the IFSW these include Evelyn Balais Serrano, Terry Bamford, Elis Envall, Nigel Hall and Ruth Stark, and the IFSW has had a longstanding connection with the work of the UN Human Rights Council and Amnesty International. A number of social work academics have written in this field such as (among others) Sylvia Staub Bernusconi, Elizabeth Reichert and Joseph Wronka and there is now a new journal Human Rights and Social Work, an initiative led by Susan Mapp and Shirley Gatenio Gabel. Human rights now occupy a central place in social work discourse. This has resonated with many social workers, and human rights has provided a powerful normative framework for social work action and advocacy, as well as for daily social work practice. It is, for many, aligned with the more progressive elements of the profession, and has been a vehicle for those who have wished social work to be more politically active and progressive in addressing the problems of the world. It would be wrong, however, to consider human rights to be particularly radical in this regard. The idea of human rights is valued across a range of ideological positions; even extreme neo-liberals like to invoke human rights when they argue for their version of freedom of expression, and freedom to earn lots of money and exploit others, even though this is a denial of others rights. Human rights can therefore become a way for social workers to be safely progressive, calling on a rhetoric of pseudo-radicalism which in some manifestations can actually be profoundly
2 conservative. It is therefore appropriate for us to consider the idea of human rights in more detail. Human rights discourse, indeed, has been subject to critique from both left and right, from feminists, from postcolonialists, and postmodernists. We need to take these critiques seriously if we are to develop a version of human rights that is relevant for progressive social work. These criticisms, taken together, can be summarised as a critique of human rights as constructed within a world view of Western Enlightenment Modernity. This has emphasised individual constructions of humanity, and has devalued the more collective understandings of humanity in other cultures and contexts. It has emphasised universalism, and this has served to devalue the importance of cultural difference in the ways people understand both the idea of human and the idea of rights. It has emphasised human rights in the public domain rather than the private or domestic sphere, which has highlighted many human rights abuses of men, while devaluing the human rights experienced by women, children, and other vulnerable populations in the domestic sphere. And it has sought to establish a single, coherent and consistent legislative framework for human rights, which has privileged the role of the law and lawyers, and devalued those rights that are not readily realized through legal processes. The Western Modernity view of human rights should not be totally rejected. It has, after all, had a significant impact in minimizing human rights abuses in many situations, and has given many people, including social workers, an active voice in human rights advocacy. However, the important point to make is that this is not the only lens through which human rights can be viewed, and an exclusive concentration on the Western Modernity approach leaves many issues relatively untouched, reinforces the intellectual colonialism of the Global North, and does not give a voice to many people affected by serious human rights violations and abuses. It constructs a one size fits all approach to human rights, firmly embedded in the Western intellectual and legal traditions, which is inconsistent with the diversity and fluidity of the world in which we find ourselves. Social work based on such a colonial and limited understanding of human rights will inevitably be itself colonial and limited, despite the good intentions of its practitioners.
3 Human rights have conventionally been understood from a top-down perspective. Rights have been defined for us, by a well-meaning global elite, and we have had relatively little say in what those rights are, how they are defined, and how they can be protected or realised. This is done for us, by well-meaning lawyers, and there has been a temptation for social workers to take on this perspective, becoming the handmaidens of the lawyers as we help them to institute this legal human rights regime. This is an approach to practice that accepts human rights as given, and sees the social work role as both educating people by teaching them about their rights, and advocating to make sure those rights are realized. The people with whom we work become essentially passive consumers, while the social worker is the heroic campaigner who saves people from the worst consequences of an unjust global system. This is hardly empowerment-based practice, and is certainly not the radical practice that many people associate with the term human rights. I do not want to devalue the important work of human rights lawyers, and of the social workers who work with them, but rather I want to suggest that human rights based social work can and should have a broader perspective, more consistent with the ideas and skills of progressive social work. One way in which this can happen is to concentrate more on the human side of human rights. Much discussion about human rights concentrates on the idea of rights, and treats the idea of human as relatively unproblematic. The idea of human, of humanity, and of the ideal form of humanity is, however, highly contested, ideological, and culturally determined. Western modernity has defined the ideal human as individual, independent/autonomous, youthful, male, white, able-bodied, heterosexual, secular, and distinct from the non-human world of other animals and of nature. This is the ideal of humanity that is constantly reinforced in popular culture (such as TV commercials), and is embodied in much human rights language; human rights are tacitly seen as helping as many people as possible to reach, or come close to, this ideal. For example, women are encouraged to compete and be more like men in a patriarchal world, the elderly are encouraged to feel young again, people with disabilities are helped to feel as normal as possible, dependence is frowned upon and independence is to be encouraged, and so on, all in the name of our human rights. As social workers, we should know better. This perspective only makes sense in the context of Western modernity, and elsewhere is both demeaning and
4 oppressive. For many human rights advocates, the human rights of Indigenous People are seen as the right for them to be as like us as possible, including western ideas of education, housing, health, community, individual achievement, separation from land, and so on. In my own country, the language of close the gap, loudly proclaimed by government and NGOs, epitomizes such well-intentioned colonialist assimilation. This should not be the goal of social work based on human rights. We rightly do not want to impose western social work on the rest of the world, so we need to make sure we don t do it by the back door by imposing western humanity on the rest of the world. A focus on the human side of human rights, and a recognition that humanity is a constructed notion, culturally determined, is therefore central to a more nuanced approach to human rights based social work. Such social work should start with a consideration of what humanity, and perhaps an ideal humanity, might mean for the people with whom we are working, and for an Indigenous community in particular it will mean almost the opposite of the Western Enlightenment tradition: valuing collective understandings of the human, valuing the contribution of elders, profound connection to the natural world, imbued with the sacredness of land and country, and so on. Indeed for the vast majority of cultural groups, outside western modernity, the ideals of individualism, independence and autonomy make little or no sense. It is only by understanding cultural contexts within which humanity is constructed, and engaging in dialogue about what it really means to be human within those contexts, that social work based on a notion of human rights can proceed. This is not to argue, of course, that all cultural practices are OK from a human rights perspective many cultures, including my own, need to be closely interrogated about the rights of citizens but the starting point for such dialogue is surely a consideration of the nature of the human that has the rights, and how ideal humanity is constructed. This also suggests that a consideration of the nature and ideals of humanity should be of central concern for social workers. This surely means that the humanities, not just the social sciences, should be core in social work curricula. It is the artists, poets, musicians, writers, philosophers, story-tellers and historians, working in different cultural contexts, who have explored and questioned our understandings of what it means to be human, and who confront us with sometimes uncomfortable alternative
5 visions. Human rights based social work needs to be immersed in these disciplines, not just in human rights law. Seen in this light, human rights are not just about laws, conventions and jurisdictions. They are also about ethics and morality, and provide a basis for our thinking about ethics in ways that go beyond the limitations of prescriptive codes of ethical practice. Human rights are about our rights and obligations, what we can expect of others, and what others can expect of us. For example, the right to be treated with dignity and respect, which I would argue is a universal human right, means very different things in different contexts, and is surely at the heart of ethical social work practice. And this is a right that is effectively impossible to protect through legal means. An important aspect of a social work perspective on human rights is the significance of relationship. Work on relational reality suggests that to understand reality we need to understand relationships, rather than looking at phenomena in isolation (something well-known to Indigenous People, but until recently forgotten by Western modernity). An atom is only an atom because of the relationship of the fundamental particles, and similarly a molecule assumes its reality because of the relationship between its constituent atoms, rather than the atoms in isolation. The same applies to a human being, who becomes a human only because of the relationships between our various organs, body parts and physiological systems, and because of our relationships with other people and with the non-human world. Denying those relationships denies our humanity. The same thinking applies to a family, a community, a nation, a society, and so on; each assumes its reality because of relationships. Such relationship-based reality is common sense for social workers, who work with the social, with relationships. But human rights too often insist on treating humans as isolated individuals, rather than as people who are made up of, and are embedded in, complex networks of relationships that are not independent of their reality, but that define their reality and their humanity. Rather than just thinking about the rights of people to be autonomous individuals, social workers need to think about their rights to community, and indeed the rights of relationships: the rights of relationships to be formed, to be protected, to be allowed to flourish, to be self-directing, to be built on mutual respect, and so on. And these are not just one-on-one relationships, but the complex webs of
6 relationships that exist in families and communities. It is the breakdown of such relationships that is the legacy of the Industrial Revolution, and that is at the heart of much human misery and alienation. The human rights to relationship, and to healthy relationships, is surely fundamental, but is not specified in UN human rights documents based on assumptions of individuality, isolation, and independence. When we think of human relationships as both having and establishing rights, we significantly broaden our understanding of what rights mean, and of the ways that social workers, as experts in working with relationships, can work for human rights. One of the fallacies about human rights is that somehow human rights make us free, and indeed rights and freedoms are often talked about together, as if they are the same thing. This is a consequence of Enlightenment liberalism, with its emphasis on something called freedom as a fundamental value. But human rights do not make us free, in the conventional sense of the term, where freedom has come to mean freedom from obligation to others, and a license to do whatever we like as long as it is not against the law. The corollary of rights is duties, or responsibilities. If I have rights, someone else has a duty to protect, or to allow me to realise, those rights. The individual on a desert island, in splendid isolation, may have complete freedom, but has no rights, as there is no-one to meet the corresponding obligations. Human rights imply human duties, and rights do not make us free; rather they bind us to others in a network or community of rights and obligations. At heart, human rights must be collective, and hence social workers, working with relationships and with collectivities, are ideally placed to work towards human rights. Human rights require strong communities, and so the community development work of social workers is essentially human rights work. In these ways, social workers, by broadening their conceptualisation of human rights, can undertake human rights practice that significantly extends traditional legal advocacy, which has been the conventional way that human rights practice can be understood. And this sort of thinking places social workers as central to the human rights task, rather than simply following the lawyers lead. It is not possible to develop these ideas too specifically or explicitly, because of the very different contexts in which human rights must be constructed. But these ideas represent
7 significant challenges, and also significant opportunities, for social workers in practice to engage with important human rights issues. There is a final area, however, where the idea of human rights poses a major challenge for social workers, and forces us to rethink many of our most basic assumptions about what we do. The world is facing serious and urgent ecological crises, which have been caused by the exploitative relationship of humans to nature. We have accepted our role as to have dominion over the natural world, and, except for Indigenous People, have set ourselves apart from the so-called natural world, seeing it simply in terms of resources to be used for human benefit. This anthropocentrism has brought the world to the brink of ecological disaster, and if there is to be a future for human civilization it will require us to accept a more ecocentric perspective. In such a world, to talk simply about human rights, is to perpetuate human exceptionalism and human privilege. It has become essential for us to critique the anthropocentrism of human rights, and to follow the lead of the governments of Bolivia and Ecuador that have legislated Pachamama, or the rights of Mother Earth. We can no longer appropriate rights only for ourselves, but need to extend them to the non-human world, to recognize and celebrate our natural interconnection within that world, and to accept our obligations that go with this understanding. The relationships that have rights are not only human-to-human relationships. In this, Indigenous People show the way for the rest of us, as their interdependence with a wider natural world is fundamental to their world view. It will have to be fundamental to all people s world views if we are to survive. This is a major challenge for social work, and indeed for any practice undertaken on the basis of rights. Such theorising about decentering the human in social work has only just begun within the profession, but it will surely become of central importance in the coming decades. Perhaps it should be a theme for a major social work conference.