Are social workers willing to take on the challenge?
The Social Worker's Role in Preventing Child Abuse and Neglect
Family violence is an issue that we as social workers will probably encounter during the course of our careers. While there are many forms of family violence, I view child abuse and neglect as the worst forms. Nothing bothers me more than knowing that somewhere, someone is abusing a completely helpless individual. I view it as our duty not only as social workers but also as humans to ensure that no child has to experience the pain and suffering involved with child abuse and neglect. This may seem like an impossible task, people have been trying for years to end child abuse with no success. I believe, however, that we have the ability to end the threat of child abuse. I hope to accomplish several things with this paper. First of all …show more content…
NCANDS defines neglect as, a type of maltreatment that refers to the failure to provide needed, age-appropriate care. Medical neglect is the failure to provide needed medical attention to a child when financially able to do so, or offered other means by which you can obtain the needed care. Emotional abuse is commonly defined as a pattern of behavior that can seriously interfere with a child's positive emotional development (American Humane Association, 1999).
These definitions for the most part are meant to be guidelines not absolute definitions. A mother, who playfully threatens her child that she will be angry if she doesn't get a kiss on the cheek, will not be charged with sexual abuse even though it fits the legal definition. As social workers we must be prepared to allow for cultural differences in child rearing practices and not be quick to judge. What may seem like child abuse to one culture may not be considered abuse by another. "The vast majority of cases fall in a grey area between the extremes. Within this grey area, the decision to report an incident is a function of societal standards of acceptable child rearing practices, legal definitions of abuse and neglect, and an individual's own value system" (Rubin, 1992). It is also this lack of a clear, exact, and widely accepted definition of child abuse that hampers us in our fight to end it.
