Entry into the field of rights exercising with a political commitment to social justice required us to take an unmarked route. When we started, we thought that our main goal was to educate social workers to use rights discourse and to support them in finding ways to realise the rights of the service users. An important aspect of the work was to allay their fears of entering the bureaucratic maze. This meant supporting them to be persistent when dealing with negative answers and to help them understand the relational aspects of this work, as well as its contribution to the therapeutic process. At the same time, the social justice perspective compelled us to understand the significant role that micro-aggression and (the lack of) symbolic capital played in encounters between service users and street-level bureaucrats, as well as to view our role as not being limited to realising the rights of a single person, but to changing policy and the attitudes of the street-level workers involved. Very quickly, we understood that the idea of realising rights is based on the assumption that there are rights that are grounded in law and that can be realised. However, the practice of viewing private issues as problems of rights, and the existence of new Rights Exercising Social Workers, opened a space for the emergence of complex issues that challenged our preconceptions. We realised that we were dealing with human situations that were not covered by law at all – the problems of migrant workers, refugees or asylum seekers, and other undocumented people appeared first. However, the problems of citizens that were not covered by existing laws and regulations also left the social workers helpless and frustrated. What could be done? What is the role of social workers in cases where there is no marked route for them to take? We were entering new social spheres of promoting social rights where legal rights did not exist. This chapter describes what this advanced realisation of rights looks like.

Introduction

Since exercising active rights is a practice that stems from identifying life situations entailing poverty as a violation of human rights together with a firm commitment to correct it through a close relationship and solidarity with service users, what is needed for exercising rights is a willingness to enter the unknown – to take unmarked routes.