”Det får ju inte drabba barnen” – en studie om villkor och mänskliga rättigheter inom ekonomiskt bistånd

Abstract

Everyone has the right to an adequate standard of living according to the International Covenant on Economic, Social and cultural rights article 11. In Sweden, one way of working with the realization of this article is the Social Services work with social assistance. The purpose of this thesis was to examine how the demands to be granted social assistance affected the realization of human rights. This was based on three research questions. How did the demands/human rights affect the decisions of the social workers and how did the social workers handle the conditions between demands and human rights? Interviews were made with social workers at the Social Service. The result analysed from both a human right based approach and a demand based perspective with the theory of street-level bureaucracy. The main result showed that both demands and human rights had an importance for the social workers in the decision making. The social workers based their assessments on the fulfil of the demands. The demands were stated in the Social Service Act, but also in the guidelines. The conditions between demands and human rights emerged when a client didn´t fulfil the demands and because of that, the application of social assistance was rejected. In some cases, the human rights were more important for the social workers. The social workers mentioned clients with children as one example and people with addiction problems as another. In those situations, the social worker had more discretion and could make a more generous assessment. If the parents didn´t fulfilled the demands, the family could still get social assistance because of the child perspective. Mostly it wasn´t a full social assistance, but money for food. The social workers handled the conditions between demands and human rights with the child perspective, inform the clients clearly which demands exists and by the possibility of granted money for food. This meant that the demands in social assistance affected the realization of human rights and had the consequences that some human rights were set aside.