Importance Of Confidentiality In Social Work

911 Words4 Pages
Social work is a dynamic helping profession, where the main goal is to improve the welfare of every individual in a society. Law is a system of legal rules that governs the way members of society interact with each other. Law is necessary for order, justice, punishment, protection and to settle dispute. Social workers need to have familiarity with the legal process and the understanding of basic legal principles in order to effectively be able to assess and intervene on behalf of clients. Problems where social work and the law overlap have consistently challenged social work professionals. In order for Social Workers to efficiently carry out their duties they must be fully aware of the law that governs the land since every country has its own set of laws and each is unique to that country. Within a Social Worker profession confidentiality is an ethical concept and a legal duty of the social worker to keep client information private. There is absolute confidentiality, that is client’s disclosure are not shared with anyone and relative confidentiality is the information is shared with the client permission or through legal requirement, for example child abuse (Shebib 2003). In this scenario, Mrs. X is married to Mr. X and disclosures information to the Social Worker of cases abuse, marital neglect and the fear of losing her kids. It is of importance for Mrs X to know the laws that governs marriage, divorce, custody, maintenance and domestic violence.
To begin with, marriage is