CJ 102 Ethical and Moral Issues

CJ 102

Ethical and Moral Issues

In this easy I will identify and discuss the ethical and moral problems that may occur if the new policy is implemented by the Department of Job and Family Services of Anytown. In the development I will determine if the new policy can have a positive or negative impact on the people involved. In the end I will examine whether the use of the social learning theory of the Anytown Department of Job and Family Services had any planning or implementation that could be misinterpreted or misapplied. So, I will determine if the new policy can be beneficial or harmful to families as well as the children involved.

In the world in which we live there are different points of view on ethics and morals, transmitting these points of view in the generations of families. These ethics and morals are taught by parents to the youngest, and where the youngest observe and learn from past generations. According to the actions that young people see and learn, it can be determined how they will develop in adult life with their moral responsibilities that they learned in their childhood. There are steps that state and federal governments take to try to keep future generations away from the behavior adopted and transmitted by their previous generations. There are acts that could be learned by these young people from their previous generations such as domestic abuse, drug use or child abuse among others.

The Anytown’s Department of Job and Family Services has introduced a new policy that states that if there is any type of domestic, child or drug abuse in the home, children will be taken out of the home, either the first time the abuse occurs or multiple abuses and will be placed under state or adoptive care. These children will be under state care until the abusers attend different types of therapies or rehabilitation for a total of six months or more, depending on the type of offense.

With the implementation of this new policy many families will say why such a policy should be implemented, but what families do not know is that if a child is brought up in an abrupt environment they can cause greater psychological damage to the child for their development.

The new policy and its requirements can be considered very hard for those delinquents with children, but the requirements are established so that criminals receive the treatments and adequate support to change their bad habits and be a better citizen, protecting children from harm higher. If the proper means are not taken to eliminate children from these bad habits, when children grow up they are more likely to commit the same crimes. These children will have inappropriate behavior and are more likely to have bad behavior at school, have problems with their peers, get low grades, which can lead them to join problematic gangs.

With this new policy, the Anytown’s Department of Job and Family Services focuses on social learning about this theory. According to investigations carried out indicate that aggressive children are consequences that their parents are aggressive that treat others with aggressiveness, example of this is that a child of a father who hits his wife (mother) the child when he grows up and marries can mistreat his wife as his father did with his mother, because that was what he learned in his childhood, however children who are raised with non-aggressive parents are less likely to mistreat people during their development and in their adult life.

The new policy implemented can bring positive as well as negative impacts for families that are in this type of situation. One of the positive impacts that can occur is the reduction of abuse in children. They can also decrease the number of children exposed to negative conditions and thus these conditions do not have a negative impact on them. These children can be exposed to a more positive environment and with better living conditions.

This policy can also have negative impacts such as the overpopulation of households with children of temporary stay. Many of these children can get negative behaviors from other children, in addition to being at risk the education of these children because they will be thinking more about their personal problems than their studies. There may be other types of problems such as justice can interfere with parents who are trying to recover their children. This policy also infers on the rights of parents, taking their children out of their homes without a coherent reason.

The charges of child abuse and drug problems are one of the main reasons why these children are taken out of the home. There are parents with these kinds of problems who have been documented and paid for their mistakes and the judge has given custody of their children again because it is believed that children will be safe, you cannot make parents pay for the same problem twice and with the implementation of this new policy is not ethically correct. Many parents had these problems many before having their children and this policy puts the welfare of their children at risk for something that happened in the past.

With this type of policy, the parents of Anytown should be careful with their actions and how to live, having the fear that the decisions they make may cost their children, even if it is only for a short time. With this policy everyone in the community will be affected, since there may be the possibility of an increase in the taxes that will be implemented to cover the needs of the foster homes of these children, where the economy begins to have problems. Anytown parents can see problems at work and even lose it because they have to meet the requirements and parameters of the new policy to recover their children.

With this new policy there is the possibility that children present psychological problems because they have to witness problems at home, in addition to the stress of being transferred from one place to another on numerous occasions. This policy can cause a lot of damage in the families of Anytown opening a possibility for crime to increase among young people.

This new policy is based on the theory of social learning defined as “the opinion that people learn to be aggressive by observing others acting aggressively to achieve some goal or be rewarded for violent acts (Siegel, 2007, p.109). As we can see the Department of Job and family services implemented this new policy thinking that it did a favor to the community, according to its definition of the theory of social learning, however the Department of Job and Family services did not take into account that the aggressive behavior of these children can be cause of other children with bad behaviors and by what they see on TV.

In my opinion I think that taking a child out of their home is not the solution to these aggressive behaviors. I think that the Department of Job and Family Services misinterpreted the theory of social learning. In this theory only, the bad behavior in the home is covered, but it does not cover the bad behaviors learned by friends, television or any other form of observation that has aggressive behaviors.

There is an experiment conducted by Albert Bandura, called “Bobo Doll”, where he uses two groups of children watching the parents acting aggressively with the dolls. One group of children observed the parents who acted with aggression were reprimanded for that and the other group of children saw that nothing happened to the parents who acted with aggression. This resulted in the children who saw the parents being reprimanded for acting aggressively with the dolls. These children treated the dolls with less aggressiveness, on the other hand the group of children who did not see the parents being reprimanded for such act, acted with more aggressiveness towards the dolls. The adults who were used as parents of these children were not even true, so it means that children learn bad behavior outside the home.

In this theory did not take into account all the negative things that parents, and children have to face, but the negative impact it can have on the community in general, this policy is not ethical and goes against the principles of citizens. I think that the Department of Employment and Family Services had very good intentions to implement this new policy but did not take into account that there were more negative aspects than positive aspects and so they would have discovered that this policy was not a good idea. There is a positive aspect of this policy that is to reduce the number of children who are mistreated in homes, but that is not what concerns the theory of social learning.

After having analyzed all the negative aspects, as well as the few positive aspects that exist, it can be concluded that this new policy is not right for Anytown. Having better an understanding of the theory of social learning, the Department of jobs and family services misinterpreted the theory. This theory can be reconsidered as long as it is not the theory of social learning the main argument.

References:

Schacter, Gilbert, & Wegner (2009). Psychology. New York, NY. Worth Publishers; p. 243-244

Siegel, L. J. (2007). Criminology: The Core (3rd Ed.). Belmont, Ca. Cengage Learning; p. 409-410

Weldon, C. (2001). Foster Care: A Psychological War Retrieved from:http://www4.samford.edu/schools/artsci/scs/weldon.html