Human rights abuses: toward balancing two perspectives

There are two perspectives on the problem of human rights abuses: the perpetrator perspective and the system perspective. The perpetrator perspective focuses on the shortcomings of persons, blaming them for neglect, cruelty, or moral weakness, and it attempts correction through education, activism, and judicial intervention. The system perspective acknowledges that the social circumstances within which individuals live can surreptitiously co-opt otherwise good people into participating in human rights abuses. Here, the corrective approach needs to focus on the complex task of altering structures and functions of systems in order to overcome structurally propelled abuses of human rights, while at the same time recognizing the moral and legal importance of allocating individual blame for the violation of such rights.