Health care professionals carry the mandatory legal responsibility of reporting a mere suspicion of child abuse but face dilemmas when ethical and legal standards are unmatched. The law demands a deontological approach but conflict arises when professional judgements are blurred by ethical principles and health care workers’ own core virtues. I will argue that these conflicts place too onerous a burden on health care professionals who must weigh up whether to report suspected child abuse or not. I will further argue that the consequentialist set of theories and approaches such as cultural relativism and virtue ethics allow for a case-by-case approach to decisions around reporting suspected child abuse.
Deontology argues that ethical decisions are based on defined
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That is to say, a decision is independent of the rules governing the act of deciding, and is considered to be moral if it produces the right result (Haines, 1995). Health care professionals may consider consequentialism over deontology when weighing up which decisions which would result in the most benefit for the greatest number of people involved (Dhai & McQuoid-Mason, 2010). In terms of reporting suspected child abuse, I reason that while the consequential approach is preferred, subjectivity is inevitable as determined by each health care worker’s individual understanding and acceptance of what “suspected abuse” is. Health care workers have an ethical obligation to acquire adequate training to enable them to suspect child abuse on “reasonable grounds”, which is defined as an objective consideration of the facts from different points of view which leads to a suspicion which has merit (Hendricks, 2014). I postulate that it is these different points of view that place too large a burden on health care professionals to be ethically obliged to report each and every suspected abuse