The Human Rights Philosophy: Support and Opposition Among Undergraduate Social Work Students

Abstract

In response to the rising importance of human rights, social work student attitudes toward human rights and the effect of human rights course content on these attitudes were assessed. Descriptive results from a sample of 77 students pointed to a few areas of low support for the human rights philosophy, specifically rights related to mental illness, juvenile justice, asylum seeking, same-sex marriage, and the death penalty. Wilcoxon signed-rank tests suggest that human rights content infusion was successful in fostering higher levels of support for some but not all human rights.