Work Placements In Human Services

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Human Services is an extremely broad term as there are many different areas of work within this field. Work placements in Human Services can range from working with people who have severe mental illnesses to working with traumatised citizens after a natural disaster. They are both very different situations however they have one major thing in common, that of helping people. Human Services focuses on the prevention and improvement of problems and the overall quality of life for people in need (Hamann, 2013). There are many different things people need help or support with, however there are some problems that are more common than others. One of the more common areas of practice is hospital social work, which includes working in community health…show more content…
A child welfare worker’s main jobs are to investigate any allegations made of abuse and neglect, conduct risk assessments and in serious cases remove the child from the family (Chenoweth and McAuliffe, 2012). However the field of child protection has proven to be too much for many social workers who after working in this area for some time have come to experience secondary trauma (Dane, 2000). Secondary trauma usually occurs after a child protection worker has had several different cases in which a child has been physically or sexually abused. Hearing these accounts from a child causes feelings of helplessness, shame and guilt as the social worker puts themselves in the child’s position they realise that as much as they try and help these children move on, they will never be able to fully take away the effect of the experience (Dane,…show more content…
I enjoy working with children and I know being able to properly counsel them from a young age will have a huge effect on the direction of their adult lives. I understand that there will be many difficult decisions that I will have to make which will immensely impact the lives of children and their families. I must on one hand be able to offer support and counsel to these families, while on the other hand exercise my authority over them if I feel that necessary action must be taken (Tham and Meagher, 2009). It is evident that this field has an incredibly stressful and emotionally draining environment, however this fact only pushes me to want to work harder. Children rely on adults for practically all aspects of their life, food, shelter, companionship and everything in between; because of this when a child grows up in an abusive or neglectful environment it causes them to believe that other adults are incapable of helping them. I want to show them that there are many people and organisations out there that will help them make a bad situation even just a little bit

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