The position of human rights in social work practice. The case for asylum seekers
Bibliographic record
Abstract
For the last three decades, Western host countries have been implementing restrictive immigration measures towards asylum seekers aiming to keep them out, to contain them in their country of origin or to toughen their living conditions in the host country. These measures have deeply affected the civil and political rights of asylum seekers as well as their social and economic well-being. Using an exploratory approach, this study explored how principally social workers deal with situations of social and economic human rights violations experienced by asylum seekers in Canada. It also explored how some key informants such as doctors, lawyers and community organizers consider social workers' practice with asylum seekers. Specifically, the study examined the institutional exclusion faced by asylum seekers and how this is managed by social workers within their practice, while exploring what motivated social workers to protect the human rights of asylum seekers under their care. Findings revealed that many factors shaped social workers' conceptions of human rights and their decisions to engage in human rights-based practice. These factors were academic training, social workers' personal stance towards human rights and social workers' approach to structural disadvantage carried out in public institutions towards asylum seekers. Findings concluded that social workers differed in their approach to situations of human rights violations. Some developed interventions centered around human rights that followed from empowerment, such as consciousness-raising, critical thinking and actions of mobilization. Others engaged in social work actions strictly structured by institutional policies where human rights are not necessarily considered. Findings also focused on praxis to understand how social workers developed their knowledge and improved their practice. Findings showed that with regard to human rights-based practice, praxis characteristics are shaped by institutional constraints. Implications included reformulation of social policies to ensure the inclusion of asylum seekers in social welfare spheres and to guarantee access to rights and entitlements. Implications for practice comprised the difference between needs-based practice and human rights-based practice, an opportunity to bridge the micro and macro aspects of social work practice, involvement of social workers and accountability of professionals involved in situations of human rights violations. Implications for social work curricula involved the inclusion of material on human rights, and a human rights approach to practice.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.012 | 0.010 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.043 | 0.135 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.016 | 0.009 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.017 |
| Research integrity | 0.010 | 0.010 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".