PHM-Exch> Food for a myth-buster thought

[Claudio Schuftan]

Human Rights Reader 330



*WHEN IT COMES TO HUMAN RIGHTS ISSUES, IS IT ONLY THAT WE HAVE TO SENSITIZE
A BUNCH OF ‘THEM OUT THERE’….OR DO WE ALSO NEED TO, AS MUCH, SENSITIZE MANY
OF ‘OURSELVES’ AMONG US?*



Actually, there is still much to do about nailing certain old and already
stale myths in the human rights domain. Among them:



Not even waiting for the expected post-2015-push, our challenge is to
concentrate our efforts on actively tackling disparity reduction
rather than concentrate
our efforts on poverty alleviation alone. (The cake is only so big; we have
to slice it more fairly…).



Targeting interventions to ‘the poor’ is nothing but depersonalizing them
and throwing at them a crumb of bread to feed them today. Targeting does
nothing to address the structural determinants that perpetuate poverty,
generation after generation, i.e., in thirty years we may still find
ourselves ‘targeting the poor’…. (Please, also mind that it is not about
‘the poor’…it is about ‘those-being-rendered-poor’ by an unfair and unjust
economic system with its clearly differential enjoyment of human rights and
ultimately *differential exposure to premature and preventable ill-health
and deaths*).*

*: Furthermore, the populations we purport to be ultimately serving are not
really ‘vulnerable’; they are also *rendered* vulnerable by the same unfair
and unjust economic system. The same is true for inequality; inequality is
not our problem: it is the individuals/structures and forces that
perpetuate inequality that are our problem. (V. Nabarro). In other words,
looking at vulnerability this way points us towards identifying and
addressing/opposing those forces, individuals and institutions responsible
for it.


In our work in HR, our challenge thus really goes beyond tackling the
social determinants of, for instance, preventable ill-health and
malnutrition; the challenge rather is about tackling the *social
determination* of the grossly unfair differential enjoyment of HR. (The
latter concept points us much more directly towards the structural social,
economic and political determinants really at the base of HR violations as
seen worldwide).

For the full Reader, go to

http://www.socialmedicine.org/?p=6685

Claudio
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