Human rights practice in social work: A U.S. social worker looks to Brazil for leadership

Jane McPherson, LCSW
Ph.D. Candidate
Brazil: Summer 2011

As a doctoral student in social work, my scholarship has been located at the intersection of human rights and social work. I wonder how U.S. social work might be transformed if we thought of our work as a human rights practice—and I am interested in reframing social work interventions in human rights terms. In Brazil, where the rights enumerated in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights are included in the Constitution, the social work profession is explicit about its commitments to human rights. In the summer of 2011, I went to Brazil to see what I could learn from Brazilian social workers.

With funding from FSU’s Center for the Advancement of Human Rights, I spent six weeks in Brazil locating, observing and cataloging rights-based approaches to social work practice. Before traveling, I made initial contact with Professor Ana Vieira, a Brazilian member of the International Consortium for Social Development (ICSD), and she agreed to be my key informant in a snowball sample of social work educators and practitioners interested in rights-based practices. She provided me with names of contacts in her city of Recife, and with others in Rio de Janeiro, and São Paulo.

As I traveled, I then asked each person I met with to help connect me with other social workers who were interested in human rights. In this way, I visited 11 universities, 15 agencies, and met with almost 100 social workers and their colleagues in public health, law, and psychology to explore rights-based or rights-informed social work practices. As a bilingual researcher, I collected data in multiple forms, including unstructured interviews, photographs, and social work textbooks. I took field notes, and composed memos to connect my observations to human rights theories and principles. My analysis was informed by extended ethnographic case method, as I constantly compared my observations to theories of human rights practice in order to extract general principles from my unique encounters.

In my travels, I met many social workers engaged in human rights work. I visited social workers assisting refugees, asylum seekers, and survivors of torture; in Brazil—as in the USA—the problems facing these survivors of civil and political human rights violations are seen through rights-based lenses, and restitution of their rights is understood to be an important part of the remedy they need. Those visits were remarkable, but, overall, I choose to concentrate my attention on social work practice areas which, in the USA, are not commonly understood in human rights terms. In a recently published paper describing this project, I highlight three programs: (1) a program that addresses child abuse in Recife; (2) a program that supports young mothers in São Paulo; and (3) a center for survivors of domestic violence in Rio de Janeiro. In each of these programs, helping clients to know their rights and empowering them to demand access to those rights are key components of the services that social workers provide. In all cases, many of the services are also standard in the USA, but their additional focus on rights sets them apart.

Publication as a result of this project:

• McPherson, J. (2014). Human rights practice in social work: A U.S. social worker looks to Brazil for leadership. Manuscript solicited by the European Journal of Social Work for a special issue on “Traveling Knowledge.” doi:10.1080/13691457.2014.947245