Professional Dishonesty - Part Three

NOTE: This is Part Three of a continuing entry. See Monday 4/30 and Tuesday 5/1 for Part’s One and Two.

Halleck’s next two ‘lies’ are also related in my mind; the lie of professional helpfulness and the lie of confidentiality. As with yesterday’s lies, there is truth in both of these, but the element of truth sometimes simply makes it harder to be conscious of the lie we are telling. The helping professional generally presents him or herself as being on the youth’s ‘side’ – yet the truth is that they are generally in a dual role as an advocate for the youth and an agent for the community. Their salary, in fact, is paid by the community, and it is the community to whom they are responsible. In more cases than we would like to admit, when the needs of the adolescent conflict with the needs of the community, it is the community's needs that will win and decisions may be made that are not completely in the young person’s interests.

Even if helping professionals doesn’t realize (or admit) this fact, it doesn’t take a very sharp young person to figure it out. This is particularly true when there is an element of coercion in the relationship. As Halleck points out, the majority of young people do not seek help voluntarily – they are sent to someone due to some deficit, problem, or behavior, where they know the professional’s job is to ‘fix’ them. With runaway and homeless youth, they are often seeking help out of desperation and the person to whom they go wields tremendous power over whether or not they get their needs met. These factors can make it very hard for an adolescent to see the professional as a ‘helpful’ person, and declarations that the professional is on the young person’s ‘side’ can ring hollow and, in fact, be less than accurate.

Confidentiality is another area where the promise may be stronger than the reality. I can relate my own experience as a consultant who has visited many youth programs around the country. One of the questions I always ask of various staff is; what are your policies on confidentiality? I am consistently confronted with unclear or uncertain responses. If an individual staff doesn’t understand the agency’s confidentiality policies, how is an individual young person going to know what level of confidentiality they can expect, and how is their confidentiality going to be protected if staff is unclear what protections they are due?

But that was all my rant. Halleck doesn’t even address that issue. He is concerned with the fact that, as agents of the community instead of the adolescent, we can’t really guarantee confidentiality at all. We don’t work for the young person, and we have obligations to their family, our agency, the community, and law enforcement. Similar to professional helpfulness, in a confidentiality conflict between the adolescent’s needs and the community’s needs, the adolescent is unlikely to prevail (particularly if they are younger than 18). If we fail to fully understand and represent our policies on confidentiality, or if we imply that we can guarantee confidentiality even within our policies, we are perpetuating a lie.

Tomorrow I’ll begin looking at Halleck’s three ‘attitudes’.