Ethics and Professional Deontology in Socio-educational Youth Work: Ethical Limits of Socio-Educational Work with Young People

In recent years, socio-educational professions have experienced a qualitative leap in the development of their epistemological, scientific, and technical foundations. One important aspect of this is a reflection on the ethical dimension of their activities. This chapter first considers the linkage between the Convention on the Rights of the Child, ethics, and social education. It then explores the difficulties that professionals encounter when incorporating their ethical commitment into their working practice, and it seeks to show that although the proliferation of declarative documents in the form of deontological codes may be of value in defining a unitary position, these documents do not constitute an effective approach to the real situations of moral conflict in which socio-educational professionals find themselves in their day-to-day practice. Finally, the chapter proposes a number of operational criteria and training proposals with a view to constructing applied ethics in work with adolescents and young people.