How research can facilitate human rights reform

Ten years ago, a heated discussion between prison staff, formerly imprisoned parents, relatives and researchers took place at the Danish Institute for Human Rights. Senior researcher Peter Scharff Smith had invited them to a round-table discussion on prisoners’ children. This was the first step into ten years of research projects, which has led to remarkable change for prisoners’ children in Denmark.

In his latest article “ Reform and Research: Re‐connecting Prison and Society in the 21st Century published in The International Journal for Crime, Justice and Social Democracy, Peter Scharff Smith shares his experience from the research projects on children of inmates. He also presents a six-stage model for how research can facilitate prison reform.

Full strategy laid down

“As researchers we often tend to stick to our desks and put all our energy into creating thorough and exhaustive products – typically in form of reports or books. But if we want to have a positive impact on human rights in the areas that we are researching, we need to engage more with the practitioners who are able to make the change. Sometimes we can even create opportunities for driving the actual implementation processes ourselves” senior researcher at the Danish Institute for Human Rights Peter Scharff Smith says.

A continuous interaction with the relevant stakeholders takes time, but in the end, your research will have a greater potential for influencing policy and practice, Peter Scharff Smith argues.

“When we began doing research on prisoner’s children at the Danish Institute for Human Rights we knew that we wanted our efforts to have a positive impact for these children and we laid down a strategy to achieve this. Throughout the process we have learned much and become more professional in terms of translating research into concrete reforms. The model we have now identified is a result of this work,” he says.

Six steps to impact

Peter Scharff Smith presents the process in this six-stage model:

1. Identify a problem, which has resulted or potentially will result in oppression of individuals and violations of their human rights.

2. Bring together the relevant actors dealing with, experiencing or influencing the human rights problem in question and engage them in a dialogue based on the preliminary research into the issue.

3. Conduct thorough multidisciplinary research. Identify and analyse e.g. relevant laws, practices, institutions and stakeholder motives from a human rights point of view.

4. Throughout the research process, a dialogue is maintained, to the extent possible, with all relevant actors – from state representatives to civil society, from the violated to possible violators – and preliminary research findings and possible recommendations are discussed with all these actors on an ongoing basis.

5. Recommendations and a preferred outcome are identified. If you have done your work properly, you now have a very strong platform for approaching politicians and other decision makers, since your recommendations are likely to be supported by a number of the central actors who you know well from the previous project stages and with whom you have cooperated or maybe even formed alliances with.

6. A useful advocacy, dissemination and implementation strategy for convincing, utilizing, overcoming, or cooperating with other powers (states, media and institutions) is decided upon in order to actually produce the preferred outcome.

Inspiration for working systematically

Ten years after the initial round-table discussions, the research projects on prisoners’ children has had several very concrete and positive effects on Danish prison practice. For example, all Danish prisons now have children’s officers whose role is to firmly anchor the child’s perspective in the individual prisons. In January 2014, all the newly appointed children’s officers met for the first time and a potentially far‐reaching reform process involving visiting conditions, staff practice, parental programs, staff‐relatives dialogue, staff‐prisoner dialogue and more broadly prison culture is now underway in the Danish prison service. In November 2014 this initiative was followed by a government initiative that funds parental courses for imprisoned parents, support for transporting visiting children and a ‘family house’ with family therapy.

As a result, most Danish prisons and remand prisons now have much better visiting facilities for visiting children and work systematically with improving contact between children and the imprisoned parents.

Peter Scharff Smith hopes the model can inspire other researchers to work with concrete reform projects.

“I am certain that there is a potential for human rights researchers to work more systematically with the process in a way that will lead to more positive impact,” he says.