Abstract
The role of the social work professional in the 21st century is to recognize human rights in their daily practice. They should focus on challenging the structural societal conditions that diminish their clients’ rights and at the same time on initiating interventions that resist oppressive structures that deny basic political and economic rights. This quantitative study aimed at exploring the level of engagement in different rights-based practices for a small sample of Romanian social workers. Results showed that practitioners are highly involved in a ‘strengths perspective’, but scored lower on ‘activism’ dimension. Further implications for social work education are discussed.
Introduction
Human rights and social work
Social work has always been focused on different human rights issues. Nevertheless, there are some concerns that current social work practice may qualify as a human rights profession (Solas, 2008). This article tries to examine this issue by analyzing Romanian social work practice as a part of the international human rights movement. In support of the claims made above, results of empirical research carried on front-line practitioners are also presented.
In 1988, the International Federation of Social Work (IFSW) International Policy stated that social work has, from its conception, been a human rights profession, having as its basic tenet the intrinsic value of every human being and as one of its main aims the promotion of equitable social structures, which can offer people security and development while upholding their dignity. (see Healy, 2008: 736)
The international definition of social work endorsed by the IFSW, the International Association of Schools of Social Work (IASSW), and the International Council of Social Welfare (ICSW) at a Melbourne meeting in 2014 also states that ‘principles of social justice, human rights, collective responsibility and respect for diversities are central to social work’ (IFSW, 2014). At the regional level, European social workers have included the human rights approach in their practice. Therefore, the European Region of IFSW Europe (2010) has taken important steps in promoting a human rights approach across countries by publishing the Standards in Social Work Practice Meeting Human Rights, making clear that ‘responding to human rights is the responsibility of the social work practitioner and social work educator’ (p. 14). The Romanian National College of Social Workers’ (CNASR) Code of Ethics (2007) also lists ‘respect for human rights’ as one important responsibility of the practitioner (Art. 14).
Embracing a human rights-based approach to social work practice requires the professional to see clients as rights holders who may be vulnerable to violations of those rights. This means transitioning from the philosophy of intervention based on ‘the charitable dimension’ (seeing beneficiaries as recipients of care) and on ‘the needs dimension’ (who may or not be satisfied at one point). Table 1 summarizes the main characteristics of the three approaches of social work practice, arguing that a rights-based approach must be taken into account. This process requires an assessment that moves beyond the simplistic and sometimes deterministic view of social diagnosis, and focuses on larger environmental and sociopolitical concerns (McPherson et al., 2017).
Comparison of the three approaches to social work practice.
This is challenging, as Healy (2008) concludes that limited visibility of social work in the global human rights movement is due to (1) the profession’s emphasis on social and economic rights, rather than on civil and political rights that command more public attention; (2) the focus being on vulnerable and socially excluded groups and not on the rights of all populations; (3) social work having a preference for the case approach rather than macro issues, which are more related to human rights; (4) the strict observance of confidentiality impeding use of cases to serve the wider cause; (5) social workers usually paying more attention to human needs than to human rights; and (6) the lack of sustained global leadership on human rights by the organizations representing the profession (p. 744).
In the context of this article, there are eight social work methods that are incorporated in a rights-based approach practice: (1) engaging clients in service planning (participation), (2) addressing inequalities (nondiscrimination), (3) employing a resource-based perspective (strengths perspective), (4) viewing clients through a person-in-environment perspective (micro/macro integration), (5) providing training (capacity building), (6) collaborating with other professionals (community and interdisciplinary collaboration), (7) advocating for clients (activism), and (8) employing reflexive techniques for own practice (accountability) (McPherson, 2015: 94).
Romanian human rights context
Romania entered the 1990s with an extreme drawback related to the political and state structure, based until then on a communist constitutional structure (Dobre, 2012). Throughout the years it has struggled to become a functional democracy, and the pressure to join the European Union (EU) on January 2007 boosted the process. Romania has therefore ratified the main international and regional human rights treaties, acknowledging their importance in the domestic legal system. This process was in most cases delayed, as can be seen in Table 2. Upon ratification, the governments must also enact domestic legislation that reflects treaty obligations in order for the provisions to be enforceable and to allow individuals to fully access their stipulated rights (McPherson, 2018).
Romania signing and ratification of major international and regional human rights treaties.
Council of Europe
Roth and Toma (2014) conclude that Romania’s practice of human rights falls behind the letters of these laws, especially for populations exposed to intersectional vulnerabilities. As any other post-communist country, Romania has had a tough road during which it registered both notable events and many failures in trying to build a real democratic society. Under Article 20 of The Romanian Constitution (2003), constitutional provisions on civil rights and freedom will be interpreted and enforced in conformity with the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948) and with the other covenants and treaties Romania is a party to. Moreover, where any inconsistencies exist between the covenants and treaties on the fundamental human rights Romania is a party to, and the national laws, the international regulations will take precedence, unless the Constitution or national laws comprise more favorable provisions. Starting from these principles, Romania has been acting internationally for the establishment of strong institutions to defend human rights, contributing to the setting up of the United Nations (UN) Human Rights Council (UNHRC). On the national level, the institution of human rights has evolved over time, by undergoing a laborious and long crystallization process (Trocan, 2010). Therefore, even if in post-communist Romania we cannot speak about large-scale disrespect of the basic rights and liberties stipulated both in the Constitution and in the international and regional documents, we cannot ignore the comments of the fifth periodic report of Romania on its efforts to implement the provisions of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights stating that citizens have plenty of rights, but they cannot always gain access to services (UNHRC, 2017). Moreover, The Economist Intelligence Unit’s (2018) Democracy Index 2017 ranks Romania 64th out of 167 countries, with an overall score of 6.44 out of 10. This ranks Romania in the last place among the EU countries in the ‘flawed democracy’ group, the most worrying fact being that the score has constantly dropped since 2008 (7.06).
Social work in Romania
After the collapse of communism in 1989, Romania appeared as an economically, politically, and socially devastated country with pictures and documentaries of the orphanages shocking the Western world (Dümling, 2004). Because of the massive involvement of the international organizations like United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund (UNICEF), Save the Children, and World Vision, things began to change in the early 1990s. In the mid-1990s, the capacity-building process started in which Western professionals became more and more involved in trainings, community development, and structural change of the welfare system. Therefore, social work re-emerged as a profession and re-invented the training system in the field (Coposescu, 2002). The schools of social work were reopened in 1990 at four major universities (Bucharest, Cluj‑Napoca, Iaşi, and Timişoara) and in 1994 Romania had the first class of in-country graduates. Since 2005, Romania has implemented the Bologna Process of Higher Education; therefore, the Bachelor of Social Work (BSW) has changed to a 3-year program and currently there are 48 public universities and 29 private universities with study programs in different areas of social sciences, with 24 social work programs (Popescu, 2011) accepting 20 to 150 students every year. Doru Buzducea, President of the Romanian National College of Social Workers, warns that while presently there are around 8000 registered social workers, the deficit is around 20,000, especially in rural areas where authorities still prefer employing persons with social work attributions and not licensed social workers (Zărnescu, 2017). We may conclude that the Romanian social work system has reached significant milestones and several drawbacks in (re-)development of its professional identity as it approaches 30 years of continuous professional education and practice.
Despite these significant outcomes, the Romanian social welfare system is far from meeting the full needs of the population. According to data from the National Statistics Institute (INS) cited by Eurostat, Romania ranks first in the EU in terms of relative poverty in 2016, with a quarter of its citizens (25.3%) being in this situation. Also, it ranked first in the EU for the proportion of children who face the risk of poverty and social exclusion, with a percentage of 49.2 percent. This means that in 2016, every second child in Romania was exposed to the risk of poverty and social exclusion. These problems are mirrored in the way social services are able to function. Like in many parts of the world, Romanian social workers are challenged by the ‘neoliberal agenda’ promoting globalization, privatization, and liberalization of social services. However, social services in Romania have suffered, among others, from low investment, poor coordination between services, and a lack of adapted responses at the local level (Doyen and Lara Montero, 2016). Caimi (2016) has concluded that in the EU, Romania is the country that invests the least public money in social services, with an average of €1061.87 per person against the EU average of €7279.45.
One might conclude that the cuts in state investments in social sectors such as health, education, and the social services put pressure on social workers to adopt a human rights approach (Nadkarni and Sinha, 2016). However, in reality, the introduction of human rights into social work education is a relatively new development in Romanian curricula.
In sum, Romania’s human rights legislation along with Romanian social work’s debate on human rights nurtured our main research goal that a first-hand exploratory observation of rights-based social work practices in a sample of front-line social workers could offer useful information about the further steps to be taken by the profession during these struggling times.
Methods
Aim
The present research has a two-fold objective: (1) to explore the social work practices focusing on a human rights approach, and (2) to explain the engagement in human rights social work practice by several personal (resilience, work satisfaction, and self-confidence) and institutional (type of clients) variables.
Sample characteristics and procedure
The target population for this study was social workers from one county in Romania. As there is no public registry of social workers, we contacted institutions via e-mail in September 2017 and invited them to ask their social workers/persons with social work attributions to participate in the study. The e-mail contained a link to an online survey created in Google Docs and remained open for completion until December 2017. Despite previous concerns that Internet surveys may be especially prone to low response rates, the literature also confirms that participants prefer web-based surveys to those administered by telephone or mail (Van Gelder et al., 2010). Furthermore, given the exploratory nature of our study, we considered that at this point, this strategy was sufficient. The online survey system was entirely anonymous, which limited the influence of the researcher in survey responses and allowed participants to freely report their perspectives. No incentives, financial or otherwise, were given to participate in this research. As reported in Table 3, the final sample reached 80 respondents, predominantly female (88.8%), young (M = 35.89, SD = 9.56, range: 20–65), and Romanian ethnics (62.5%). The sample supports the previous findings of national licensed social workers that professionals in the field are not a diverse group compared to the populations they serve in terms of race, ethnicity, and gender (Lazăr et al., 2016). Little over 60 percent (N = 51) occupy a social work position and 9:10 work in urban settings; 36.3 percent had a social work attribution and 40 percent of the total sample were employed by a public institution, the rest being employed in the non-profit sector with/without religious affiliation.
Respondent characteristics of the study sample (N = 80).
Measures
Human Rights Methods in Social Work (HRMSW) (M = 124.66, SD = 15.27) is a multidimensional, self-reported scale that comprised eight subscales, each measuring a key method of rights-based practice approach: (1) participation, (2) nondiscrimination, (3) strengths’ perspective, (4) micro/macro integration, (5) capacity building, (6) community and interdisciplinary collaboration, (7) activism, and (8) accountability. Table 4 describes the construct definitions of the subscales as were defined by McPherson (2015).
Human rights methods in social work: Construct definitions.
Source: adapted from McPherson (2015: 115).
The scale focuses on what social workers report, including in their practice rather than just their opinions about certain practices: ‘as a social worker I …’ followed by a specific action focusing on human rights practice. The scale contained 32 items, equally distributed among the eight dimensions. For each item, respondents marked their response on a 5-point scale ranging from not at all to a lot. By adding the responses for each subscale, a composite score was generated, higher scores indicating more usage of specific human rights methods in their current practice. The HRMSW was previously used on a US sample of social workers, and therefore, as in this study, modification/adaptation of the original scale was required and initial reliability might have been affected. Table 5 shows that the internal consistency of the entire 32-item scale was excellent (Cronbach’s α = .93), with values for subscales ranging between .64 (participation scale) and .88 (activism scale).
Reliability among all scales.
HRMSW: Human Rights Methods in Social Work.
Resilience (M = 20.53, SD = 2.37) was defined as the ability to function properly in spite of stress or adversity and was measured using a 5-item scale. Two items were from Smith et al. (2008): ‘I tend to bounce back quickly after hard times’ and ‘It does not take me long to recover from a stressful event’; two items were from Wei and Taormina (2011): ‘The difficulties in my life have made me a stronger person’ and ‘I am determined to finish what I start despite obstacles in the way’; and one item was newly created (‘I am a determined person’). These were measured on a Likert-type scale ranging from 1 (not at all) to 5 (a lot). A composite score for resilience was generated, higher scores suggesting more resilience. The internal consistency of the 5-item unidimensional resilience scale was acceptable (Cronbach’s α = .75).
Work satisfaction (M = 4.03, SD = 0.82) was measured using a single item adapted from Diener et al.’s (1985) Satisfaction with Life Scale to the work context to obtain a short global work satisfaction measure (‘I am satisfied with my work’). Employing a 5-point Likert-type scale, higher scores mean higher level of satisfaction with the job.
Self-confidence (M = 4.33, SD = 0.59) was operationalized as the level of confidence in their own capacity to successfully perform daily tasks and was measured by a single item taken from Kline and Graham’s (2009) Social Worker Satisfaction Scale: ‘I can cope with my workload.’ Using a 5-point Likert-type measure, a higher score indicated a better level of confidence.
Demographic and professional information comprises the final portion of the survey instrument. Participants were asked to report their age, gender, religion, and race/ethnicity. In addition, they were asked about themselves as social workers: education, current field of practice, work environment, and experience in the field.
Data analysis strategy
This study employs a cross-sectional quantitative design. Both descriptive and inferential statistics were used to summarize and interpret the findings of this study using IBM SPSS 22.0. Results were generated in tabular formats. The maximum level of significance was set at .05 (p = .05), meaning that we accept a 5 percent chance that the observed relationships occurred by chance. Three main analyses were run:
Reliability test was conducted to estimate the reliability of the scales employed by this study.
Pearson’s correlation coefficient was used to indicate whether and how the dimensions were significantly related to each other.
Multiple regressions to estimate how the specific practice related to the type of clients and personal predictor variables are associated with engagement into human rights social work methods.
Results
Relationships among variables
Means, standard deviations, and bivariate correlations for the output variables are reported in Table 6. We noticed that the highest score was obtained for ‘strengths perspective’ (M = 17.03), meaning that in their practice, social workers manage to focus on client and community capacities and talents and are able to harness these assets to create significant change in clients’ lives. However, the lowest value was obtained for ‘activism’ (M = 12.20), suggesting that social work practitioners are less involved in advocating for social and political change for the benefit of clients. As for their work environment, respondents generally declared a high level of confidence (M = 4.33) and satisfaction with their job (M = 4.03). Their personal resources encompassed in the level of resilience were also high. Pearson’s correlation coefficient showed that there are moderately significant associations among all eight subscales measuring human rights practice. The strongest relationships were observed between ‘capacity building’ and ‘accountability’ (r(78) = .692), ‘participation’ and ‘accountability’ (r(78) = .672), and ‘micro/macro integration’ and ‘community and interdisciplinary collaboration’ (r(78) = .620). These results suggest that practitioners engaged in building clients’ skills in the personal and political realms, allowing clients to participate in changing unjust personal and political situations and involving them as equal partners or even leaders in all the stages of social work process, are also more likely to support creating a professional service environment that promotes human dignity by making services fully transparent to all stakeholders and by encouraging reflection on those services at the professional and agency levels. Similarly, social workers intervening at both individual (micro) and social (macro) levels, in order to help clients with their immediate problems and prevent recurrence of those problems in the future, are also more able to create professional alliances that cross professional and social boundaries for the purposes of helping clients and promoting sustainable change in the community. Accountability also appears to be better associated with resilience (r(78) = .423) and work satisfaction (r(78) = .409), suggesting that engaging in a transparent practice with all the actors involved fosters a better level to deal with stressful situation and a higher level of work satisfaction. In turn, self-confidence is best associated with ‘capacity building’ (r(78) = .401). As expected, resilience is not related to work environment (satisfaction and capability), as this is seen more as a personal resource developed in other contexts and further transferred to the workplace if needed. Also, in this study we measured resilience as a general construct and not resilience in the specific context of social work practice, and this might have altered our results.
Means, standard deviations, and bivariate correlations of the output variables.
p < .01; *p < .05 (two-tailed).
Predictors of HRMSW practice
Multiple regression analysis was used to test whether the type of clients and personal resources significantly predicted general social workers’ usage of human rights methods. The results of the regression indicated the two set of predictors explained 37.1 percent of the variance (R2 = .371, F(16, 61) = 2.24, p < .01). We found that resilience significantly predicted usage of human rights practice (β = .37, p < .01), as did work satisfaction (β = .23, p < .05). Therefore, social workers displaying higher levels of resilience and those who declared being satisfied with their daily job are prone to using more frequent practices that promote human rights values. Employing a multiple regression model, we tried to explain how different forms of work contribute to specific human rights practices (Table 7). We observed that social workers delivering services to persons with addiction problems engaged more in participatory practices (β = .24, p < .05). Contrary to our initial expectations, those working in mental health services engaged less in participatory practices (β = −.28, p < .05) and in the accountability process (β = −.22, p < .05). Working with minority clients significantly fosters stronger engagement in a strengths perspective (β = .35, p < .05), capacity building (β = .34, p < .01), and accountability (β = .66, p < .01). Social workers working with children were less engaged in capacity building (β = −.30, p < .01). Similarly, working with unemployed clients meant less engagement in participation (β = −.33, p < .05), non-discrimination (β = −.39, p < .05), and capacity building (β = −.41, p < .01). This complex picture ultimately shows that there is great variability in how social work professionals engage in different human rights practices according to the specific service he or she has to deliver. As for the personal resources, resilience was the only variable that had a significant impact on nearly all the eight human rights practices. Work satisfaction had only a significant impact on accountability (β = .29, p < .05), suggesting that social workers who reported higher levels of work also reflected more on their own practice.
Summary of regression analysis for predicting human rights methods (N = 80).
p < .01; *p < .05.
Conclusion
This article has outlined the most significant rights-based practices employed in practitioners’ daily work and explained their level of engagement using individual and organizational variables. The study concluded that front-line social workers display higher levels of engagement in non-discriminatory practices and employ a strengths perspective in their direct practice with clients. These both are essential values of social work practice. By adopting a non-discriminatory value, social work has put much more emphasis on ‘empowerment of individuals in terms of their “rights,” and focuses on the development of active citizenship among clients rather than simply demanding that all clients are respected for who they are’ (Hart et al., 2003: 484). Through this empowerment-based social work practice, both social workers and clients develop a partnership in which they work together in finding a solution to the defined problems (DuBois and Krogsrud Miley, 2005). However, activism recorded the lowest level of employment. As one recent study shows, social workers are less willing to demonstrate explicit and persistent striving to work toward gaining more control and action to change the social conditions (Tcholakova et al., 2017). This may be interpreted in relation to the traditional perception of social work practice in Romania as offering primarily direct assistance and care.
However, one of the most significant moments in the development of social work practice was the transition from a practice based on needs toward a practice based on rights. Therefore, the rights-based approach requires front-line social workers’ knowledge of relevant international and regional agreements in the field of human rights (Reichert, 2015). Dewees and Roche (2001) proposed that there is a difference between social workers’ task of helping clients to meet their various needs and advocating for their various rights. However, human rights-based social work can be somewhat complicated by the contradictory role social worker plays in the society. The profession itself has at its core the requirement to advocate for social justice, but it does this operating within ‘a political and economic context that is based on, and supports, exploitation and inequality’ (Lundy, 2011: 42). In this context, human rights are essential tools that social work professionals can use to navigate these competing demands of the social and political environment (Lundy, 2011; Reichert, 2015). Among these demands, there is the task of repositioning the profession as a result of decentralization policy, in which specific tasks have been transferred from the central government to the local authorities coupled with simultaneous austerity measures in the social care system, confronting municipalities and social workers with different responsibilities and tighter budgets. Against this transitioning background, embracing a human rights perspective may seem the right step. It is not surprising that social work practitioners, educators, and high policy-level actors in the social work field are starting to perceive human rights as a valuable asset to their profession (Dibbets and Eijkman, 2017). This is why we must include the perceptions and attitudes of front-line social workers in the model. The goal of this small project was to identify, explore, and explain the rights-based practices that social workers use in their work settings. This study must be seen as a first step in the effort of understanding the relation between human rights and social work in a specific context of practice. With all its limitations mainly related to the small sample and procedure, through this small effort the profession can begin to create a clearer road map for strengthening this connection and protecting client rights (Steen et al., 2017).
Further research should focus on larger government and non-profit agency-based programs to investigate their use of rights-based methods. Also, a qualitative approach aiming at understanding their use or their resistance in using a rights-based approach could foster better learning objectives in training future social workers. Moreover, in this case, only service providers were questioned; further goals would be to interview service users as well as the primary beneficiaries of social intervention and to evaluate specific programs on the ability to meet rights-related goals.
Implications for social work education
Social work education prepares students for the mission and values of the profession (Miller, 2013). Previous research already recognized the role of social work in advancing a human rights perspective, described in many publications in the field (e.g. Healy, 2008; Ife, 2012; Mapp, 2008). This provides social workers an integrative conceptual and instrumental framework for their interventions: Human rights are inseparable from social work theory, values and ethics, and practice … Advocacy of such rights must therefore be an integral part of social work, even if in countries living under authoritarian regimes such advocacy can have serious consequences for social work professionals. (United Nations Centre for Human Rights, 1994: 5)
Under the current neoliberal agenda, the socio-economic and political climate is perceived as hostile to social work, practitioners being pressurized to move closer to the demands of ‘the system’ and further from the needs of their ‘clients’ (Hyslop, 2016). In the area of training, as a result of the drive for flexibility, efficiency, and modernization, many tasks previously undertaken by social workers are now undertaken by unqualified workers or other professionals, further weakening the profession (Spolander et al., 2014). Therefore, there is important pressure on social work education to teach students how to remove structural barriers while serving the people who are most marginalized (Dewees and Roche, 2001). This is also due to the continuing process of globalization the social work profession is going through. Social work students are increasingly exposed to different countries and cultures. Schools of social work must embrace a firm and explicit commitment to human rights among social work programs. This means altering the curricula to include not only an understanding of what human rights are and what it means, but to create opportunities to integrate these concepts into the field education (McPherson and Cheatham, 2015; Werkmeister Rozas and Garran, 2016). Through development of human rights competency, social workers will develop the passion, motivation, and experience to effect change and enact the mission of the profession (Davis and Reber, 2016).
Footnotes
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
