Introduction
This paper aims at exploring the ethical, moral and legal challenges of potential dual relationship as an advocate or otherwise a mediator. I will tell my opinions in the paper regarding the integration of advocacy and mediation process within the human services.
I will outline my philosophy and personal approach to advocating and mediating the Planned Parenthood Agency. However, advocacy and mediation are recurrently being integrated into various continuum of the human services field.
Dual Relationship challenges
A mediator is a neutral third party who assembles with two or more conflicting parties to encourage and enhance communication to come up with an agreement or conclusion over a conflict that exists between the parties. S/he does not act as the decision maker but as a peace maker, he gives a more conducive discussion environment to the two or more parties and leaves to the parties to make the final decisions.
It’s the legal and ethical job as a mediator to ensure all communications remains confidential unless otherwise specified. This gives room to no doubts and guarantee mediator’s integrity, and accuracy is established between the conflicting groups (Barsky, 2007).
The mediator is expected not or never to be unfair to any party or force a party to come into concurrence with the other. Since mediators are impartial, their individual or personal beliefs and values sometimes can be a challenge.
Professionalism
As a professional mediator there are legal, moral and ethical matters that you have to tackle when handling the conflicting parties. A mediator has to guarantee each party comfort and know that their issues are fairly heard without biasness. It’s very significant for the mediator to remain bias.
Personal Perception
Mediators and advocates are very fundamental to the human service field. Clients depend on the mediator to enlighten them of their rights and protection. Always the clients seek for advocate assistance due to their lack of laws and procedures to seek justice and protection and this is why mediators and advocates are there to provide this assistance.
Personal philosophy and approach
The services given at the Planned Parenthood Agencies are significant enough, mostly there are teens that are very young and have no idea on how to communicate with their parents. The means of communication is this stage is advocated and mediated on to ensure that the relationship between teens and parents remains intact and their grievances are highly accepted by the both parties (The Association of Attorney-Mediators, 2001).
If any of the conflicting parties gets unsatisfied with the biasness of the mediator, they are encouraged to seek different counsel to complete successfully their mediation process fairly and accurately. I also believe that every situation in conflicts is different and that people deserves to exploit a second chance.
Furthermore, these people need help and as a human service officer we are expected to help them accordingly. It’s my personal philosophy that not everyone is badly if they are in a probation period. In sometime people go down the wrong direction in life and need to be helped to get back on track, this happens when we keenly listen onto their problems and help them to come up into a long lasting solution as they strengthen their relationships in life.
Conclusion
Mediating and advocating for clients is a significant service provided today in the human service field but it takes strong, knowledgeable and wise individuals to accomplish this job. As an advocate you find yourself standing up for a party and its interest but as a mediator you negotiate agreement without getting involved in the decision making.
A mediator strives for a positive outcome for both groups while keeping his/her values out of the equation. If one wishes to be a mediator he should look for an agency that offer services to clients that they believe in; it’s difficult to expect a mediator to be completely frozen to the world around him/her
References
Barsky, A. (2007). Conflict Resolution for the Helping Professions. Belmont: Wadsworth Publishing.
The Association of Attorney-Mediators. (2001). Association of Attorney-Mediators Ethical Guidelines for Mediators. Web.