SOWK 425 Week 8 DB Forum 4 Example

Discussion Board Forum 4: Thread and Two Replies

SOWK 425 Social Work in International Settings, Discussion Board Forum 4 (thread and two replies)

Thread by [Student Name]

The prompt, the worker, the program and the classmates' posts are composites standing in for the course's own forum; Scripture, the handbook, the books and the declaration are real and described from their published sources; the requirements follow Liberty's public course guide for SOWK 425.

Thread

Aïcha, a composite Nigerien social worker, runs a girls' education program in the Maradi region of Niger, where many girls are married before eighteen and some by fourteen. Parents she meets are not cruel. They describe marriage as protection for daughters, a way to secure family alliances and relief from the cost of feeding another child in a drought year.

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights states that marriage requires the free and full consent of both spouses (United Nations General Assembly, 1948), and a fourteen-year-old cannot meaningfully give that consent. Mapp (2014) describes the long debate between universalism, which holds that human rights apply to everyone, and cultural relativism, which holds that practices should be judged within their own cultural context, and she suggests that rights can be advanced through engagement with local communities rather than imposed from outside. Healy and Link (2012) present human rights as part of the foundation of the global profession, which places Aïcha on the universal side of that debate.

I agree, but with a qualification about method. The right is universal, while the path to honoring it must be local. Aïcha is more likely to delay marriages by working with imams, mothers and village chiefs on girls' schooling and family income than by lecturing parents about international law. Her standing as a Nigerien woman who shares their faith and language gives her a credibility no foreign worker could have.

Can outsiders legitimately challenge a custom like this, or should that role belong only to people within the culture?

Reply to Rachel

Rachel, you agreed that Aïcha should work through local leaders, and a rights-based framework can make that approach more systematic. Androff (2016) identifies five principles of human rights-based social work practice: human dignity, nondiscrimination, participation, transparency and accountability. The principles apply to how the work is done as well as to its goals. For Aïcha's program, dignity means treating parents as partners who want good lives for their daughters, not as violators. Nondiscrimination means ensuring that girls from the poorest households and minority groups are reached first, since they face the highest risk. Participation may be the most important: girls themselves, along with mothers and religious leaders, should help design the program rather than receive it. Transparency means being honest about the program's aims and funding, and accountability means reporting results to the community as well as to donors. Applied together, the principles would keep Aïcha's program from becoming one more project designed in an office far from Maradi. They would also give the community ways to correct the program if it drifts, which is how participation becomes ownership. A village committee that reviews enrollment and marriage figures each season, for instance, would let families see for themselves whether keeping girls in school is changing their community.

Reply to Ethan

Ethan, you argued that social workers should not interfere with long-standing customs because doing so repeats colonial patterns. That history is real, and your caution deserves respect. Yet the evidence suggests a third path between imposing change and staying silent. In Senegal, the organization Tostan offered community education on health, literacy and human rights, and thousands of villages afterward chose to declare publicly that they would abandon female genital cutting and child marriage. The change came from community deliberation, not outside pressure, which is why it has tended to last. Scripture also speaks to the question. Genesis 1:27 teaches that every person, male and female, is created in the image of God (English Standard Version Bible, 2001/2016), so a girl's dignity does not depend on her culture's view of her. In Proverbs 31:8-9, a mother instructs a king to raise his voice on behalf of people unable to plead their own case and to judge fairly for those who are poor and in need. A fourteen-year-old bride in Maradi often cannot speak for herself. Supporting local voices who speak with her, as Aïcha does, honors both your concern about imposition and the girl's God-given worth. Silence, in her case, is not neutral, because it leaves the decision with those who already hold power over her.

References

Androff, D. (2016). Practicing rights: Human rights-based approaches to social work practice. Routledge.

English Standard Version Bible. (2016). Crossway. (Original work published 2001)

Healy, L. M., & Link, R. J. (Eds.). (2012). Handbook of international social work: Human rights, development, and the global profession. Oxford University Press.

Mapp, S. C. (2014). Human rights and social justice in a global perspective: An introduction to international social work (2nd ed.). Oxford University Press.

United Nations General Assembly. (1948). Universal declaration of human rights (Resolution 217 A).