In the field of social work and human rights, measurement is a young field. The HRLSW, which measures a social worker’s orientation to practice, is the first scale to measure human rights practice within the social work context (McPherson, 2015). The HRLSW measure also emerges as part of a larger project that defines human rights practice in social work as practice that sees the world through a human rights lens, is accomplished using rights-based methods, and aims toward human rights goals (McPherson, 2015). As assessment guides intervention, a human rights-based approach to practice must begin by learning to see. The Human Right Lens in Social Work (HRLSW) scale focuses on the social worker’s orientation to practice and therefore allows social workers (as well as their supervisors and researchers) to measure their approach to assessment. A rights-based social worker acts as an ally or partner to the client in the fight for social justice. A rights-based approach to social work practice requires an assessment that moves beyond individual diagnosis and focuses on larger environmental and sociopolitical concerns. Taking a human rights-based approach to practice requires the social worker to recast the client as a rights holder and to assess and push back against the structural inequalities that affect the client’s life. Not all social work, however, is rights-based social work. Motherhood and childhood are entitled to special care and assistance.
Perhaps the clearest link between social work and human rights exists within the Universal Declaration of Human Rights itself Article 25 elaborates the right to “necessary social services”:Įveryone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services, and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond his control. 5).īeyond these explicit statements, scholars note that traditional social work ethical codes echo the Universal Declaration of Human Rights even when they do not specifically mention human rights (Reichert, 2011), and that social work’s ethical commitments compel social workers to advocate for human rights (Androff, 2010 Buchanan & Gunn, 2007 Cemlyn, 2011). specifically, the Council on Social Work Education (CSWE) included human rights as a core competency for social work education for the first time in 2009, and the 2015 edition of the educational policy and accreditation standards stated that the purpose of social work is “actualized through … the prevention of conditions that limit human rights” (CSWE, 2015, p. Principles of human rights and social justice are fundamental to social work. Utilizing theories of human behavior and social systems, social work intervenes at the points where people interact with their environments. The social work profession promotes social change, problem solving in human relationships and the empowerment and liberation of people to enhance well-being. Conclusions: This scale is a useful tool for educators, researchers, and practitioners who want to practice-or promote the practice of-social work as a human rights profession. Thus, factor analysis confirms a two-factor, 11-item model for the HRLSW scale, consisting of two subscales, clients seen as experiencing rights violations, and social problems seen as rights violations. All fit indices were within their critical values (χ 2/ df ratio = 1.5 CFI =.99 TLI =. Results: A respecified model using only one error covariance fit the data very well. The exploratory factor analysis was performed on half of the sample ( n = 507) to establish the underlying factor structure of the construct the other half of the sample ( n = 507) underwent a confirmatory factor analysis to examine the subsample’s psychometric properties. Method: Data from a convenience sample of 1,014 licensed clinical social workers were collected by electronic survey, and the sample was split to conduct discrete exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses. The purpose of the research was to gather evidence regarding the validity of this multidimensional measure of a new construct, i.e., human rights lens. Objective: This article reports the initial validation of the Human Rights Lens in Social Work (HRLSW) scale, a tool designed to measure a social worker’s ability to see individual and social problems as resulting from human rights violations.
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