Human Rights-based Approaches to Clinical Social Work

This brief provides a framework for how a rights-based approach can be applied to clinical social work practice. The brief then illustrates this approach by applying it to practice with survivors (and in one case perpetrators) of several major human rights issues: torture, human trafficking, and intimate partner/family violence. A unique contribution to the social work literature, this brief demonstrates the application and benefits of a rights-based approach outside of the realm of macro-social work practice and judicial and legislative efforts. Common challenges to a rights-based approach are explored and case studies and sample class exercises are included to help practitioners and students apply the principles to scenarios and dilemmas they may confront in real-world practice.

S. Megan Berthold, PhD, LCSW is Assistant Professor in Casework at the University of Connecticut School of Social Work. She is a Certified Trauma Specialist and has worked with diverse refugee and asylum seeking survivors of torture, war traumas, human trafficking, female genital mutilation and other traumas since the mid-1980s in refugee camps in Asia and in the United States. She was a clinician and educator in refugee camps in Nepal, the Philippines and on the Thai-Cambodian border. Before joining the UCONN faculty, she worked in Los Angeles for twenty years with the Program for Torture Victims and other non-profits. Dr. Berthold conducts federally funded clinical outcomes research with torture survivors and NIMH funded research examining the prevalence of torture and its mental and physical health consequences among Cambodian refugees. She frequently testifies as an expert witness in U.S. Immigration Court and has trained numerous social workers and other professionals about vicarious trauma and resilience, self-care and trauma-informed approaches to working with diverse survivors guided by cultural humility. She is a member of CSWE (serving on CSWE’s Taskforce on Advanced Social Work Trauma Education), NASW, SSWR, APHA, the International Society for Health and Human Rights (ISHHR), the International Society of Traumatic Stress Specialists (ISTSS) (appointed to the Leadership Council), and is a member and former board member of the Association of Traumatic Stress Specialists (ATSS). In 2009 she was selected as the National Association of Social Work’s national social worker of the year.