Analysis of Human Services of an Abusive Scenario - Research Paper

Introduction

There are some legal and ethical implications which are applicable due to the age and the relationship between the father and teenager. The father is expected to be the guardian and the provider to the children that he has brought forth together with the teenager being one of them. He is supposed to be there any time the child needs him either to talk to or in taking care of her basic needs like shelter, food, and education. This is not a favor but a right that the child has to enjoy from the father. The teenager, on the other hand, has to respect her father by being obedient and following any orders directed unto her. Since the father is the head of the household that they are staying in, he will go by extension set the rules that need to be followed like the waking up time and when everyone needs to go and sleep. For purposes of the case under study, these obligations have to be identified and grouped to be either legal or ethical for both of them.

Is your time best spent reading someone else’s essay? Get a 100% original essay FROM A CERTIFIED WRITER!

Save 25%

There is the jurisprudence that guides the obligations of the members of the family to each other for the sake of their peaceful coexistence. They have some rights and privileges that their unique positions within the family entail to them. Therefore if any of them does not follow and deliver in line with the obligations of the law, he or she will be found culpable and may need to face trial. The law is clear in the abdicating of responsibilities by the parent, and on the other hand, it will also be there to prevent any one of them from harming the other (Crosson-Tower, 2013). It is there to protect law and order and deal with the ones who are not adhering to what they are supposed to deal with. In the case of a teenager who has not attained the legal adult age, he or she is supposed to be under the guardian to take care of him or her. If the teenager attains the legal age, then he will be expected to meet his expensed or have an understating of sharing some of the responsibilities for him to continue living under the same house with the guardian or parent.Parenthood has been mistaken in some quarters as being biological, but it does not stop there, but some social aspects need to be met as well. The parent is expected to be an example to the child to be emulated in various respects. For example, he will select the church that they will be attending and the schools that they have to join as long as it is within his means especially if he has to meet the costs involved. According to Recce, Hanson, and Sargent (2014), he is the one to take the child to a hospital of his choice whenever he or she falls sick. The parent is the one to make decisions on the form of treatment to be administered if consent is to be sought. At any time when there is an issue where members of the family are taking sides then his decision will be final. Even though he may consult the family members but his choice has a deciding vote since he will be answerable if things do not work out. The parents are assumed to be stewards taking care of human beings who will later move out and start taking care of their houses. If things do not work out as expected, it is the steward who will be answerable.

The children are supposed to follow all the rules set by the parents including addressing the chores allocated to them. This is on the understanding that they are being prepared for parenthood. They are to go to school and take their homework in line with what is expected of them in their schools. The parents will be involved when they have discipline problems or other issues in school. They are to accompany their parents to their church and subscribe to their religion without any choice of going to other places (Mathews & Bross, 2015). The children are not allowed to be alone in the houses or other establishments unless with prior arrangements where other people will be in charge of them. This means that unless they have attained a certain age, they may not be allowed to leave the house unaccompanied to go to the shop or for other outings. And even for the ones who are at an advanced age, they will still not be allowed to come back to the house at any time of their choice. They are also not allowed to take alcohol, cigarettes or attend events that are known to be reserved for adults only.

There is a high possibility of the family system failing than it is poised to succeed. There are no set clear guidelines on how to go about meeting their expectations. There are also situations where the parents are not aware of their expectations when it comes to the raising of their children (DuPre & Sites, 2015). Some of them come from broken homes or have never been exposed to a place where children were being raised. Therefore they have got no one to look up to or copy and duplicate the same in their houses. There is also the various pressure of life that does not allow them time to focus on the children upbringing. It will be worthy to exploit in detail some of the sources of these failures.

In the contemporary world today there are various sources of pressure on the parents and what is expected of them. Unfortunately, Agathonos-Georgopoulou (2009) agrees that the sources of their information do not expose them to the nitty-gritty involved in the raising up of their children for them to learn. They have their relatives, friends and the media including the internet to relate to the ones that they see there. Unfortunately, these sources portray happy, successful families that do not have any pressures or problems. It is natural for people to put their best image forward and would not like others to know that they are going through any difficulties. Hence they will be seen smiling, playing together happily and hiding the bad image that is at the back. They portray an image of excessive freedom to their children which is not exactly what happens behind the scenes.

Some parents are afraid of being viewed as failures, and they will go to great extents to avert this. They cannot imagine their children misbehaving, beg late for school, attaining lower grades or turning out to be failures in life. They go to the extent of pushing their children excessively and piling too much pressure on them at the expense of them behaving their age. This borders on child abuse as they may even get punished unnecessarily for minor offenses (Cooper & Whittaker, 2014). This may have a retrospective bearing on them with some losing confidence and not believing that they can make it in anything due to the contains bashing.

In most homes, the parent is the final say on most matters even when whatever he is asserting is not logical. There is no system of having someone play an oversight role on him and correct him when he goes wrong. Tudoran and Boglut (2015) agree that the children are left at the whims of his mercy without knowing where and to whom they can report. They may not even have an idea that what is taking place is not right. If they have an idea, they cannot report their parents for fear of straining the relationship between them. Hence they are left at no option rather than to take whatever comes their way knowing too well that a time will come when they will leave their homes when they grow up. Unfortunately, this trend breeds other abusers who met it out on their children in turn, and there are also situations where children may run away from home due to these abuses.

There are cases where only one of the parents is taking care of the children. This could be as a result of one of the parents being too busy or working away from home. For the ones who are in the military, they have got no option other than to abdicate their responsibilities to their partner especially when they are on missions outside their countries (Crossn-Tower, 2013). There are also situations where the parents may have divorced or got their children out of wedlock and have to take care of them alone. Due to frustrations or feelings of inadequacy the remaining single parent may easily resort to abusing the children. In this category, there are also those who find themselves with children without having been prepared for them. So they come up with their ways of raising them without even knowing what the law or the society expects of them.

When the case of the teenage girl is put into consideration, it will be observed that she has been living with her father since she was a small child. She has not known any other guardian, and it may be difficult to take her away from this scenario. There are legal and ethical implications which led to the circumstances of not taking her away from the father. The court found it fit to take her back to continue living with the father despite the allegations that had been made.

Legally the court's hands were tied, and it could not take the child away from the father. For a start, there was no compelling evidence to prove that the father had been abusing his child. Medical records may have shown this, but at the end of the day, it may have been committed by any other person. This is a child who has been attending school, and she may have been abused sexually outside the precincts of their home (Reece et al., 2014). The child herself did not report that the father had been abusing her. If the father was to be tied to the crime, they had to get samples of semen deposited in her and march them with the ones that her father had. This called for DNA evidence which was a tall order unless there were reasons to compel the same to be done especially if the act had just happened and evidence had not been interfered with. There were no previous records of such crimes against the father to guide them into treating him as a suspect. If the court had taken the child from the parent without sufficient evidence the risked having he decision being contested successfully.

The release of the child back to the father presented some ethical problems that were going to be challenging to address. The mere fact that the social workers had portrayed him as a suspect means that the relationship between the father and the child were already strained. Mathews and Bross (2015) observe that the child was going to be more afraid and withdrawn and there was nothing that could be done to protect her from the supposed guardian. If the father has been living with the child since her birth, it was going to be difficult to have her believe that she can survive without him. The society believes that one's father has a natural right to take care of his children unless there are strong, compelling reasons to deny him the right.

Human service agencies cannot address family issues without taking into consideration their cultural affiliations. Some practices and beliefs are handed down to families from their parents, and the agency will risk being labeled to be culturally insensitive if they ignore them. This is more compounded if the ones raising the matter belong to different cultural groupings compared to the family whose issue is being addressed (DuPre & Sites, 2015). It will be imperative if they can get someone who belongs to their culture or if they can seek to underrated their practices and approach their problem with that in mind. This is also the same issue when their religious affiliation is considered as it will have a bearing on the way they relate to or deal with some specific issues. For example, some cultures and religions forbid the close contact between fathers and their daughters when the latter attain a certain age. There are also others that cannot allow a child to speak anything against elders or their parents and hence getting any information from them will be a daunting task (Agathonos-Georgopoulou, 2009). This calls for the employees engaged with human services agencies to be culturally competent to avoid running into a misundersta...