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Case Study

Decent Essays

Purpose
The purpose of making changes to legislation is to ensure that children and youth are safeguarded against sexual violence while in the care of the government. We are proposing changes to provincial legislation in British Columbia (BC) as child protection workers work with BC legislation. While there are many important points in your paper, please note that this assignment required students to make recommendation/s for policy (not legislation reform).
According to the Canadian Association of Social Workers (2015) "social workers uphold the right of every person to be free from violence and threat of violence (p.5). As emerging social workers, we must be critically examining the policies when children are being harmed under …show more content…

The Ministry of Child and Family Development (MCFD) is required to report critical injuries, which include sexualized violence, to the Representative of Children and Youth (RCY) (Turpel-Lafond, p.4, 2016). The rate at which children and youth disclose sexualized violence is quite low, and if the children or youth choose to disclose what has happened it does not come “until years afterwards” (Turpel-Lafond, p.6, 2016). There is an array of different reasons as to why children and youth may not disclose their sexualized violence, such as: fear of getting someone in trouble, blaming themselves, feeling embarrassed or ashamed or afraid, threats from the perpetrator, or accepting what has taken place as “normal” behavior. Due to a lack of reporting to authorities it is difficult to fully determine the extent of sexualized violence perpetrated against children and youth. However, in a BC survey an estimated 13% of female and 5% of male children and youth have reported being sexually abused, the rates were even higher for Aboriginal youth with 23% of females and 7% of males (Turpel-Lafond, p.6, 2016). Children who have experienced or witnessed other forms of violence in their home or whilst in care are less likely to ever disclose. Disclosing is a complicated process for children and youth, thus they are more likely, if ever, to disclose

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