Ethical Issues That May Occur in Your

¶ … ethical issues that may occur in your area of human services. Then explain the tools you might use to identify and address ethical issues and issues related to cultural competence. Finally, explain how your leadership style might influence the tools you select to use.

Ethical Issues

The ethical issues that human services administrators face can be highly complex: This is, in fact, the nature of ethical dilemmas. For issues that are relatively simple, there are legal restraints and for issues that fall between the legal and the purely ethical, codes of conduct for the profession. When there are these types of written guidelines, the ethical choices for a professional come down to a very simple choice: Either follow the rules or break them.

However, in many cases the proper path to follow is far from clear, and one of the reasons for this is that those working in the human sciences are often working with individuals who come from a very different cultural background than the administrator or clinician is. The case of Alphonse that we are presented with in the readings for this paper presents a range of the ethical issues that human service workers face.

Since Alphonse is a member of a gang, working with him will almost necessarily require that the clinician or human services worker be made aware of a number of crimes, some of them potentially very violent. Different laws apply to the revelation of information gained from subjects, and so this must be considered first. However, in many cases there will be no obvious legal guideline.

In this case, what is the proper course of action? There are two clear possibilities. One could refuse to work with him because one does not want to be exposed to crime, either because of personal danger or because of the ambiguity of not knowing what to do in the face of ongoing crime. However, if one were to refuse to work with him, then one would be abandoning a client who desperately needs help. For me, the correct choice would be to work with him because the obligation to work with him overrides the other concerns. However, I would work as part of a team that would help educate me about the subculture in which Alphonse lives so that I could be both as safe and as effective as possible.

Another ethical issue that is brought up in these readings is how does a clinician who is working with criminal offenders navigate the dual responsibilities and sets of expectations that are placed on one first by the criminal justice system and the prison culture and, secondly, by one's clients and one's professional code of conduct.