Social work ethics and children: Protection versus empowerment

Evidence indicates that a growing proportion of children and adolescents experience traditional child protective services as intrusive, oppressive, and even exploitive. Professionals tend to deny the reality that youngsters experience, project their own perceptions and vulnerabilities onto youngsters, and refuse to recognize the ability and right of youngsters to control their own lives. Empowerment of minors is an ethical obligation of the social work profession and the only true protection from abuse and neglect.     

Evaluating correctional health care. The lessons of New York City.

New York City's correctional health care system is a complicated one, with many component parts. Correspondingly, the task of developing an evaluation process to assess this system turned out to be complex as well. The major responsibility for developing such a process and for keeping it in motion lies with the Contract Evaluation Unit of the Department of Health. Our experiences in meeting these challenges, as well as the historical and institutional factors that have influenced our efforts, should be of interest to professional groups facing similar tasks in other localities and to readers curious about how particular health service evaluation approaches take form. This article describes our method, how it emerged, and that it entails, with an eye toward identifying what might usefully be applied to the study of other correctional health care services and settings.