All human beings are born equal and equality is a fundamental right of every human being. Every international organization aims to establish the basic equality and child protection rights, but it is important for the authorities to adhere to the laws and policies as stated by the international bodies such as the United Nations, the Children Welfare Associations. The problem of neglect and abuse of children is a widely reported phenomenon. The children suffering from disabilities are often treated in a very unfair and unethical fashion. Disability does not in any way, implies that the person is incompetent or cannot compete with the other students. The disabled persons need to be given a platform so that they can imbibe the knowledge and comprehend it with ease. Disability should not in any way be a hurdle to their progress. The inability to follow the guidelines set by the international organizations as well as the national legislative bodies need to be checked by the local authorities and the other national bodies. The disabled need to be given special learning software that aids them in grasping the knowledge in their own way. The economy of any country is determined by the production of its resources whether it is through the industrial production or through the services provided. When any institution discriminates against a person based on their physical disability then it is the economy of a country, which gets affected. The countries, which help the disabled to progress and move forward in life so that they realize their true potential, have the benefit of reaping the services, which are provided by the disabled person. Discrimination based on disability is a gross violation of human rights and any issues, which arise through the denial of such rights, must be immediately rectified by the authorities, which are entrusted to secure the disability rights. The essay deals with the issue of child abuse and how to cope up with the issue in a more appropriate way. The essay analyzes the issue faced by the student Young Person, who had enrolled in a college for a two-year course. The various laws and regulations to safeguard the problems of the student Young Person are also mentioned in the essay. The efforts of the legislators to formulate legislations to safeguard the disabled are also mentioned.
The case study deals with the ordeals of a visually impaired person, Young Person who is of Black British descent and is eighteen years old. Currently she is residing in the Cambridge shire area. The young person has been provided accommodation by the local authority based on Section 20 of the Children’s Act of 1989. The section 20 of the Children’s Act of 1989 states that the local authority has the duty of arranging the accommodation for the children. It is also referred to as voluntary care because usually the parents agree to the accommodation which is provided to their child. The section 20 of the Children’s Act of 1989 is the undertaking of the child into a care system through an agreement rather than through court order. The Section 20 of the Children’s Act of 1989 also mentions that the child upon reaching the age of 16 shall be liable to take their own decisions and shall not be dependent upon the parent’s decision. The Section 31 of the Children’s Act 1989 further states that the Court can make an order to place the child under a designate authority if the Local Authority applies to the Court for making a child subjected to care order. The Court can only make a care order if it feels that the Child is suffering or is under any threat or harm. (Legislation.gov.uk 2018). The Children’s Act of 1989 assigns duties to the families and the concerned bodies in the United Kingdom to make sure that the child is given all the facilities which may be necessary for the welfare of the child. The Children Act of 1989 explicitly states that the welfare of the child shall be of utmost importance and the Courts should make sure that the rights and privileges of the child are secured. From the case study, we find that the young person has recently shifted to the local area. Previously, she was in a specialist residential school for the blind. The young person is not finding any support from the working professionals who stay nearby her locality. She enrolled herself in a local college to complete a Media Course of 2 years duration.
The young person has also availed the Education, Health and Care Plan (EHCP) which every child with Special needs and disabilities can avail provided their request for availing the EHCP facility is assessed and accepted (GOV.UK 2018). The young student besides seeking privilege from EHCP has also taken help from the Leave Care team where she is under the supervision of the personal adviser whose role is to assist the student in her accommodation, plan her future as well as employment options and to provide any other support which she might require (GOV.UK 2018). The personal adviser would also be providing her support in her EHCP and would be involved in the ongoing meetings. The Leave Care Service serves the people in the age group between 16-18 who have been looked by a Local Authority Children’s Service Team. The duty of Leave Care is to support a person until he/she attains the age of 25 in the case of disability and should be receiving the support of a Personal Adviser until the age of 25. The young person has also sought the assistance of the Advocacy Service agency whose duty is to assist the young person to raise her issues so that the college and the examination board work together as a multi-disciplinary team to support the aspirations and need of the young person. The Advocacy Service based in the Eastern Anglia region of the United Kingdom is a team which assists youths who are below 21 years of age. The services of this agency extend even up to the age of 25, provided the people availing the services are continuing their education. All the services provided are done by paying attention to the wishes and feelings of the child to uphold the children’s rights and confidentiality which is maintained at all the time (Ham et al. 2015). The Children Commissioner’s duty is to see that the young person is not discriminated against and to provide external support to her. The Children’s Commissioner also has a duty to make the people who make decisions for the children understand the issues and threats the children face in their daily lives.
The young person has suffered due to the negligence and inefficiency of the college authorities in providing her basic privileges which are necessary for the people suffering from visual impairment. The college must ensure that the student gets a detailed description of images, has access to information provided to her in understandable formats whether it be in Ms Word, Speech, touch screens with voice over or Braille devices. The issues faced by the student Young Person are in violation of the Equality Act of 2010 which ensures that common people are safeguarded legally from any type of discrimination. The new Equality Act was made effective from 1 October 2010 and it unites all the previously separate laws into a single easier framework and provides protection to the people who are subjected to injustice and maltreatment. The Act attempts to establish a just and stable society. (Legislation.gov.uk 2018). This Act merged all the former anti-discrimination laws within a single framework which made the law comprehensive and secured the objective of protecting people who are vulnerable. The Human Rights Act 1998 which is in effect for a long time promises freedom and rights which are stated in the European Convention on Human Rights. The Government of the United Kingdom also passed a legislation known as Working Together 2015/2017 wherein the local authorities have been entrusted with the duties of ensuring the safety and welfare of all the children and young people (Assets.publishing.service.gov.uk, 2018). The local authorities have to ensure that children are protected from maltreatment, prevent any development which halts the development of the child or acts as an impediment in the health of the child, ensures that the children are under safe and effective care, to always undertake actions which are best for the interest of the child’s overall growth and development. The Working Together 2018 differs from the Working Together 2015 plan in the aspect of the revision which was made in the Children and Social Work Act Section. The Act advises replacing the Local Safeguarding Children Boards with a more quality based flexible local boards which are to be guided by three safeguarding partners- the local authorities, the chief officers of police and the clinical commissioning groups. The Act also made it mandatory to establish a national Child Safeguarding Practice Review Panel to assess and overview the actions of the concerned parties. The United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child also provides for the protection of the civil, economic, political, social and health rights of the child. The student Young Person must be provided justice and the local authority must ensure this as the Legislation of Working Together 2015/2017 mentions it clearly. The organization’s safeguarding duties need to be managed by a senior board level due to the sensitivities involved in Children’s issues. In the case study, the problems faced by the young student could have been resolved if the college authorities would have been summoned by the local authorities. People suffering from disabilities are also part of the society and therefore, it is highly imperative to give them the facilities which help them in realizing their self-actualization goals. They can also contribute to the overall growth of the society as well as the progress of the economy provided they are also given the platform to perform.
Providing protection and securing the rights and privileges of children is a complex topic and requires a thorough understanding of the topic as well as sensibility towards the subtlety of the issues faced by the children, especially if they are disabled or children with special needs. The children are guaranteed rights and securities by various International as well as National Organizations, but it is important to make sure that they are strictly adhered to at the local levels (Sz?cs 2014). The Working Together 2015/2017 legislation which was passed by the Parliament of the United Kingdom lays emphasis on addressing the issues faced by the children and the duty for addressing the issue has been handed over to the local authorities. The local authorities must work in close coordination with each other as well as all the institutions which deal with children so that the processes of daily lives which affect the children are assessed (Nova and Gonzalez 2016). If during the assessment, any individual child is seen as requiring help then the local authorities must make sure that the rights of the child are secured and investigated. The children, as well as the family of the child, might also require help and assistance from the local agencies, so the local authorities must make sure that they are provided with the necessary assistance and guidance (Jain et al. 2014). Sometimes, it might mean coordinating with more than one agency, so the Local Authorities should be comfortable in dealing with the inter-agency assessment.
Child protection requires moral and political solutions to the issues. The moral evaluation must be done to secure the well-being of the child. In the case study, the young person was discriminated against by not given the basic services which would have enabled her to grasp the knowledge and her disability would not have been a hindrance in her quest for obtaining knowledge. The situation is a prime example of deprivation of rights, so there are multiple violations on the part of the college. The issue of gaining access to certain rights and privileges is different for different organizations. The different organizations, working together for safeguarding the rights and privileges of the students with disabilities, must adopt a coordinated working strategy to achieve an effective safeguarding outcome. The duty to look after the implementation of this strategy is entrusted to the local authorities by the Section 10 of the Children Act 2004 (Chiodini et al. 2013). The local authorities are required to take necessary steps to support the well-being of all the children who are residing in the territory under the local authority. Safeguarding the rights of the child is important because doing so enables the children not to feel neglected. This is more important in the case of children with disabilities because they are normally made to feel neglected and discriminated due to their disability. A culture of listening and paying attention to the aspirations of the child is essential to make the children grow up in a society where they feel important in contributing to the society’s progress (Lent 2017).
The staffs and volunteers of the organizations which are dealing with the critical issue of child rights and disability rights should have clear knowledge about the policies and procedures involving Children. They must be responsible and aware of the issues of abuse, neglect and exploitation. The staffs and volunteers must imbibe the quality of fast redressal of the problems and the duty to act must be ensured in all its entirety. They must also be aware that the student Young Person is at a vulnerable position and justice must be provided to the student Young Person as soon as possible so any time lapsed in providing justice to the student Young Person can have adverse effects on her (Edwards and Anderson 2014). The managers and commissioners of the organizations and the services must have clear cut expectations from the employees and must evaluate the actions of the staff members so that the quality standards or benchmarks are attained. The commissioners have the added responsibility to ensure that the disabled are provided all the moral support and assurance, particularly those who are less privileged or disabled and less able to protect themselves from harm, exploitation and abuse (Perry and Carter-Long 2016). The Local authorities who are assigned to perform this duty shall have to foresee that the coordination among the different organizations and agencies involved in this aspect are closely working in association with each other and there is no lapse in their functioning capabilities. The issues arising in their functioning must be resolved immediately and any decision to solve the issue of the student Young Person must be implemented quickly. The regulation and inspection of health and social care services are done independently by the Ofsted Regulations and Monitoring (Bellman, Byrne and Sege 2013). The Ofsted Regulations and Monitoring perform the important role of making sure that the best health and social care are delivered to people in a very secure, compassionate and quality based approach. The Ofsted Regulations and Monitoring registers care providers and checks as well as rates their services. The Ofsted Regulations and Monitoring aim to protect the people who use the services of the leave care facilities. The aim of the Ofsted Regulations and Monitoring is to preserve the rights of vulnerable people such as those people who are suffering from mental illness or those people who are physically disabled. In the case study, we can see that the student Young Person has been suffering the injustices of the college authorities (Sooryanarayana, Choo and Hairi 2013). She has also taken the assistance from several organizations, so it is important that the Ofsted Regulations and Monitoring monitor the actions of the organizations which have undertaken her cause and fights for preserving her legitimate rights as a citizen and as a human being (Cqc.org.uk 2018). The actions of the organization can also be assessed through the framework of the Professional Capabilities Framework. The Professional Capabilities Framework attempts to set a professional standard to determine the actions of the Social Workers. The duty to assess the work of the Organizations is done by the Social Work Reform Board (Sin and McGuigana 2014).
The Professional Capabilities Framework (PCF) attempts to establish stable expectations of social workers, provide both professional and basic social work knowledge to all the people who are engaged in the field of social work, make the workers aware about the design and application of the national career structure and to provide the social workers a framework though which they can decide about their careers and professional development (Narey 2014). The PCF is binding upon all the social workers in the United Kingdom. The frameworks and assessing bodies are important for any organizations as they help in checking the discrepancies as well as flush out the chances of corruption and inaction. In the case study, the student Young Person has sought assistance from more than one organization, so it is imperative that there be such assessing bodies which can provide a framework for all the organizations to adhere to (Dickson et al. 2014). The framework helps in maintaining coordination among the different organizations and this coordination is extremely important especially if the organizations are involved in Social Work. The main motive of Organizations involved in Social Service is to provide justice and assistance to the children who have been exploited or denied their rights. Therefore, the importance of the Assessing Bodies like the Professional Capabilities Framework (PCF) or the Ofsted Regulations and Monitoring cannot be negated (Vanclay et al. 2015).
There are many ethical dilemmas which can arise out of this case study. The student Young Person is a young Girl, is of black descent and is visually impaired. She has been denied the right to access to such materials which could have helped her in understanding the course study given her physical impairment. There are two basic conflicts in social ethical values in her case study (Valutis and Rubin 2016). The right to self determination is important and is a right of every human being irrespective of gender, class or race (Moore 2017). At the same time, the right to confidentiality is also to be adhered to at the same time provided that the student Young Person is already in a vulnerable situation. These tow conflict areas in ethics must be sensitively handled by the social workers and care must be given to maintaining a balance between the two ethically relevant issues (Grace and Cohen 2015). The six core values of social workers which are service, providing social justice, maintaining the dignity of the person, giving importance to the human relationships, maintaining integrity and competency must be adhered to always by the social workers. Doing these fundamental things will speed up providing justice for the student Young Person and help her in not losing further time in irrelevant things (Ratts et al. 2015). The student Young Person is also pursuing a two-year course, so it is important that she gets all the assistance and support from the authorities and social organizations in completing her course and deciding the profession of her liking. The most important difficulty faced by social workers is budget constraints. The allocation of funds is a crucial determining factor in doing social work and it is extremely difficult to get funds for doing social work (Soma et al. 2014). A budget constraint should not be an impediment to providing justice for the children who are abused and denied rights. This is the duty and responsibility of the government that adequate funds are allocated to the organizations involved in social work because they are the organizations who perform the important task of reporting the malfunctions and discrepancies emanating from any unethical practices of organizations (Moriarty, Baginsky and Manthorpe 2015). Every society which supports inclusion and takes all the people irrespective of class, gender or race forward, progresses. To provide social inclusion, the anti-discriminatory policies and practices must be encouraged. Discrimination based on gender, disability, ethnicity, color or religion severely impedes social inclusion and growth of an individual which in turn impedes the growth of the society. This results in the feeling of alienation and helplessness of the social group or individual (Edwards and Addae 2015). It is not always that individuals face discrimination from another individual or group of people. As can be seen from the case study, the student Young Person has faced discrimination from the college authorities who have denied her basic rights. The college authorities had promised to provide her access to all the software which could have proved beneficial to her to help her overcome her physical impairment (Stevens et al. 2013). By denying her these services, the college authorities have wasted the student Young Person’s time, made her feel harassed and exploited her situation. There are innumerable instances in a society wherein people get discriminated and abused. It is the role of the social worker to help provide justice and fight for the determination of the cause of such human beings (Rousso 2015). Being a social worker is not easy. A social worker has a profession which is full of challenges as well as opportunities. The main aim of social workers should be a to provide justice and helping individuals, families and people to overcome the problems which they face in their daily lives. Social workers often act as connecting factors between different organizations and institutions in order to assist the patients and help them get justice (Board 2014). Social workers also have to keep in mind the functionality of law and various legislations which are passed in the parliament and how they affect the vulnerable groups (Brayne, Carr and Goosey 2012). The interface among the social work and the law involves the coordination among the legal system, statutory laws, case law and legal laws and the social worker needs to be adept at understanding the intricacies which are involved in examining the case study (Croisdale-Appleby 2014). In the example of the case study, it was important to go through the various laws and international agreements regarding human rights which strengthen the case of the student Young Person. The understanding of these laws enables the social worker to work with thorough understanding and help in speeding up providing justice to the student Young Person.
The case study was dealing with the issue faced by the student Young Person who is a visually blind student and had enrolled herself in the college to complete her studies. The college despite promising her of providing the services necessary for completing her studies had been unable to fulfill the required necessities. The student had also availed the services of various organizations such as leave care. From the above analysis, the issue of disability needs to be carefully handled and the local authorities must make sure that they adhere to the requirements as stated by the various organizations such as the United Nations and the Children Act 2004 and Children Act 1989. The issue of children abuse and disability abuse must be mitigated as soon as it is brought to the limelight. The children with disability should be encouraged and made to feel a part of the society so that they are not felt segregated. The disabled are an important part of the economy and effort should be made to make them contribute to the economy positively. There must be authorities to make sure that the efforts of the institutions such as colleges and schools are analyzed and thoroughly checked. Providing these checks and balances are important for providing security to the disabled. The legislators in the United Kingdom have formulated various laws and legislations to incorporate the disabled as part of the working plan to secure the rights and privileges of the disabled in the country. The children with a disability who have experienced discrimination are scarred for a lifetime, the reason being that the people who are disabled need to be constantly motivated and encouraged and disability should never be an issue in their professional career. By denying the rights of the disabled, the college has dented the morale of the student Young Person and it will need immense efforts from the local authorities and the other agencies to make sure that such horrendous acts are not repeated in the future. The British Parliamentarians and the Public Servants have explicitly been vocal about the support they give to the equal opportunity which must be given to all the individuals irrespective of their class, gender, race or disability. The disabled despite suffering from physical impairment are seen to possess immense mental strength and understanding. Their talents need to be improvised in order to make sure that all the workforce is contributing to a country’s economy and no particular workforce is being left out. The students who are disabled must be given priority and they must be protected from any indecent acts or behaviors.
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