Abstract
Although social work has long expressed support for human rights principles, scholarship in this area suggests that many social workers still struggle to apply human rights principles to practice. This paper aims to help address this gap by illustrating how a common human rights principle, the right to be free from discrimination, can be applied to a popular risk assessment tool used by social workers in the child welfare system in Ontario, Canada. This paper draws on case examples and knowledge from the field of law to highlight how this risk assessment instrument may increase the tendency of social workers to violate this right. It then offers suggestions about how social workers can modify their practice to better comply with their human rights obligations.
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Notes
In this study, Article 8 (the right to respect for private and family life) of the European Convention on Human Rights was the focus of the analysis.
Admittedly, this approach also has some drawbacks in the sense that international human rights frameworks are not perfectly implemented by their domestic counterparts and often contain gaps where particular international human rights are either not recognized or are imperfectly enforced. This is all to say that although this paper relies more heavily on domestic frameworks, international instruments should not be ignored.
See also: Fraser v. ING Insurance Co. 2004 BCHRT 163 (CanLII).
It should be emphasized that this generally applies only to situations where someone’s rights or entitlements are at stake (e.g. obtaining a drivers license or being investigated by child welfare).
In many cases, even this will not be sufficient. There are some situations where a protected characteristic (e.g., race or sexuality) is so overtly irrelevant that even asking about it may amount to a discriminatory practice.
For audiences in the United States, this last point has at times been decided differently. Certain categories of discrimination (e.g., age, disability) may require a more arduous causation standard — commonly known as the “but for” test. This has created a situation where, in some cases, even when a discriminatory reason for an impugned action has been identified, it will not be sufficient to ground liability unless it was the reason for an individual’s adverse treatment (as opposed to “a” reason) (see Gross v. FBL Financial Services, Inc.,557 U.S. 167 (2009); Univ of Tex. Southwestern Med. Ctr. V. Nassar 570 U.S. 338).
It is worth noting that this stereotype has been specifically condemned as a violation of the Article 23 of the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. The UN Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (2018) has noted that parents with disabilities “are frequently seen as inadequate or unable to take care of their children” (p 14) and has condemned any attempt to remove children from their care on the basis of this often erroneous assumption.
In fact, one common criticism of some of these instruments is the fact that few of them publish any equity information on the models they use, particularly with regards to how well these models may or may not perform across different equity seeking groups (Russell, 2015). The absence of this information presents a serious problem when it comes to assessing the compliance of these instruments with human rights principles.
Admittedly, one could argue that social workers are also at risk of exercising their “discretion” in a discriminatory manner. Indeed, research has demonstrated that clinical judgment suffers from its own biases (see: Bartelink et al., 2015). However, this is not an argument for maintaining potentially discriminatory actuarial risk assessments — it is an argument for teaching social workers how to exercise their discretion in a manner that is consistent with rights-based practice.
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Reid, L., Houston, E. A Human Rights Analysis of a Risk Assessment Instrument in Child Welfare. J. Hum. Rights Soc. Work 7, 13–22 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s41134-021-00195-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s41134-021-00195-9