A case study of how specialist child abuse investigators within a police service of Northern Ireland public protection unit learned to apply human rights

Abstract

This research involves a case study of specialist child abuse investigators within a public protection unit within the Police Service of Northern Ireland. The research seeks to determine how the detectives learnt to apply human rights as a result of participation in the specialist child abuse investigators’ development programme. The research adopts a more comprehensive examination of human rights than that adopted in traditional legalistic approaches to human rights evaluation. The research incorporates analysis through Aristotelian virtue ethics to gain a more comprehensive understanding of human rights inclusion.

An analytical tool was developed and used to examine legalistic and virtue ethic inclusion within distance learning and formal classroom elements of the course. Data gathering entailed semi-structured interviews with 8 practitioners who had completed the course and 8 stakeholders who are in a unique position within the PSNI to enable them to comment on how human rights were learnt and applied by the child abuse investigators.

A case study utilizing a grounded approach was used to generate the neo-Aristotelian virtue ethic analysis theory, which outlines that the use of neo-Aristotelian virtue ethics can greatly assist in describing how specialist child abuse investigators learn to apply human rights. The research also identifies three categorisations of virtue ethic engagement. These focus on the importance of moral virtues for practitioners, the importance of intellectual virtues and the centrality of justice. The research makes 31 recommendations concerning how human rights should be considered within the training cycle and highlights characteristics of an emergent human rights pedagogy.

Date of Award	Jun 2014
Original language	English
Supervisor	Alan Mc Cully (Supervisor) & Tracy Irwin (Supervisor)