Social Issue: Child Neglect and Maltreatment
Name
Institution
Social Issue: Child Neglect and Maltreatment
Children are prominent members of a community since they become future leaders. Raising children well allows them to become successful contributors in their communities. However, most people disregard the importance of raising children appropriately. Cases of child maltreatment and abuse continue to occur across generations. Children’s protection laws have not been effective in preventing unnecessary harm to juveniles. The situation makes it necessary to establish foster homes and orphanages as places where children can receive essential protection. These institutions do not lead to sustainable solutions since they cause social divisions and make parents irresponsible in raising children. Although people rely on different methods to deal with the problem of child abuse, social workers can provide sustainable solutions.
Child neglect and maltreatment cause long-term social challenges. Findings from a recent study showed that child neglect causes poor mental health and related issues (Geoffroy, Pinto Pereira, Li, & Power, 2016). In this case, neglected children fail to access suitable nutrition and medical care. Such occurrences lead to poor mental development and increased delinquency among youngsters. Child maltreatment leads to poor academic attainment (Geoffroy, Pinto Pereira, Li, & Power, 2016). In this case, most so the juveniles who experience violence do not lead successful career lives. Instead, they increase the social burden in the community. Therefore, child neglect and maltreatment leads to long-term social problems.
Social workers provide adequate support to communities, which lead to sustainable solutions. Qualified social workers rely on ethical reasoning to arrive at principled decisions (Dagan, Ben-Porat, & Itzhaky, 2016). This statement implies that a social worker handles individual cases of negligence uniquely. The approach leads to sufficient identification of the core problems and the establishment of workable solutions. Therefore, social workers use ethical reasoning to establish long-lasting solutions to cases of child abuse and negligence.
Integrity and competency can enhance the ability of a social worker to deal with child abuse and negligence. Integrity allows social workers to focus on identifying the actual actors that lead to child abuse (Nguyen & Nguyen, 2016). In practice, honesty helps to reveal the root cause of a specific case of child negligence. Competency enables social workers to establish solutions that can benefit the affected child and society (Nguyen & Nguyen, 2016). This statement implies that a qualified professional must look for amicable solutions to every case of abuse or negligence. Such approaches involve the members of the community, which enhances the ability to detect and solve instances of neglect. Therefore, integrity and competence can strengthen the ability of a social worker to deal with cases of negligence and child abuse.
In summary, people rely on different methods to deal with the problem of child abuse. However, most of the conventional techniques used fail to lead to amicable solutions. Social workers can provide sustainable solutions through ethical reasoning when dealing with specific problems. The most important core values in the Social Work Code of Ethics are integrity and competency. In practice, these two principles can enhance the capability of a social worker to deal with cases of carelessness and child abuse.
References
Dagan, S. W., Ben-Porat, A., & Itzhaky, H. (2016). Child protection workers dealing with child abuse: The contribution of personal, social, and organizational resources to secondary traumatization. Child Abuse & Neglect, 51, 203–211. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chiabu.2015.10.008
Geoffroy, M.-C., Pinto Pereira, S., Li, L., & Power, C. (2016). Child neglect and maltreatment and childhood-to-adulthood cognition and mental health in a prospective birth cohort. Journal of the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry, 55(1), 33-40.e3. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jaac.2015.10.012
Nguyen, H., & Nguyen, T. T. (2016). Optimistic but confused: Perceptions about the mission and core values of social work in Vietnam by Vietnamese policy-makers, social work faculty, and practitioners. Asian Social Work and Policy Review, 11(1), 53–65. https://doi.org/10.1111/aswp.12113