A Case for an Expanded Framework of Ethics in Practice

Using a case vignette as an illustration, an expanded framework for examining ethical issues in human service practice is proposed. The article argues that the helping relationship is multiply constructed through discursive fields, rather than being a given, and that the lens of ethics must be widened to understand both the highly contradictory nature of practice, with its accompanying paradoxes, and the broader structures that constrain and influence practitioners. The article draws on the centrality of the concept of ethical trespass to recognize the inevitability of some level of harm in the application of human service work, despite intention or skill. At the same time, investigating workers' uses of resistance to the dominant discourses is suggested as a means to edge toward the reduction of trespass.