Some most common dilemmas of social workers in the relationships with the representatives of their

own profession

The whole process of social work, like the process of education, is in this tension. It is the tension between the subjective world of the man in need (by analogy, the disciple) and the social worker (educator) and the objective world; between the man and the world. This must be deepened and broadened through the process of education.

Just like the teacher’s responsibility the social worker’s responsibility is in fact a dialectic responsibility. The social workers (similarly like the educators) stand in this field of tension between the man and the world. Here they must ever anew enter the feelings and situation of the young man. At the same time, they must look at the whole of human life and from this perspective respond to particular tasks that can be seen in the disciple who needs help. This responsibility is manifested in the specific tension as one penetrates the world of the other person and at the same distances oneself from it.

There arises a serious danger that can well be noticed from the position of the dialectic of pedagogical responsibility, namely that the look at the whole of the disciple’s way may sometimes narrow one’s openness to a concrete moment, to specific tasks in life and their reasonable performance. The two moments should be simultaneously taken into account. Since such responsibility is firmly linked with the present time and with the quest after a respective moment to act, it is called responsibility for time. The social workers in their responsibility become in a temporal tension, where they must grasp the past, come forward to the future, and stay firmly in the present time (Drechsler, 1965, 421-423).

Therefore it seems that experience and commitment to internal conflicts, the need to make difficult choices become indispensable

elements of the social worker’s professional activity. Most problems, dilemmas, and internal conflicts appear in the situations connected with the direct practice of social work.

There are, among others, the following problems:

1) How can one act and help effectively? In this aspect one can name three most often experienced ethical dilemmas:

• uncertainty with regard to choices and decisions. This is the dilemma connected simply with the fact that one is working with another person and there arises a question: what I am doing, is it good for this person? Am I not doing any harm? Is not my help e.g. harmful to a given family, a concrete child?

• the necessity to make choices between actions strictly determined by rules and effective action. The source for this dilemma is the sense of incoherence between the rules and the practice of social work. The dichotomy: effective action – action conformed to the rules appears in social work very often and is expressed by the words: am I supposed to help to conform to the rules, or should I also take effectiveness into account, and sometimes skip the rules?

• the action taken against the client’s will. Taking the client’s good into account, the social worker must sometimes in the name of this good take actions as if against the will of this client. This kind of experience can be most severe when in the centre of our action there are children, their well-being and health, their good and formation.

The code of the ethics of a social worker is apparently essential in such situations. It is interpreted with the following functions:

1) the code is perceived as a mechanism that regulates how the social workers should conduct, defines the ethical aspects of their relation with the client, colleagues, superiors, the institutions that employ them, the attitude toward their profession;

2) the code of professional ethics may become an element by which to raise the prestige of the job, the rank of the social worker in society;

3) the code should have the validity of professional law and be a foundation for solving conflicts by arbitration disputes within a staff etc.;

4) the code is given a certain function that protects the social worker against various pressures from outside, e.g. to reveal information about the client;

5) the code may contribute to raise the standard of the job and self-development.

It is important to protect the values and promote such values as e.g. dignity of another person, effectiveness of action, honesty, tolerance, responsibility, etc.

Conclusions

The education of social workers and their professional ethics is normally concentrated upon aspects of the relationship between social workers and their clients, and on psychologically and pedagogically and also an ethics oriented working methods and competences.

These – an ethics oriented sensibility of a social worker – are very important and necessary parts of professional competences, but to avoid dissatisfaction and loss of plausibility in the profession, social workers need not only a certain ethical professional knowledge but a professional ethical mentality and sensibility in which he should be better prepared to create the organisational conditions required to undertake professional work at a high level and in reality doing it with the responsability.

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