Ethical Guidelines for Working with Culturally Diverse Clients

Abstract

In the past few decades, cultural awareness and cultural competence in clinical practice have become an important point of focus among helping professionals. Moreover, helping professionals have raised concerns regarding the gaps in current professional ethical codes regarding multicultural competence in clinical practice. That is, professional ethical codes may not adequately provide guidelines and considerations that are culturally informed in providing care for diverse clients, especially when facing ethical dilemmas. An issue that may arise is that helping professionals opt to follow Eurocentric ethical frameworks over culturally informed ethical decision-making when faced with an ethical dilemma, potentially to the detriment of the client. This chapter provides an overview of the professional ethical codes and criticisms of these in relation to multicultural ethics and multicultural competence. Next, the concept of multicultural ethical competence is discussed in conjunction with ethical decision-making models. This chapter also brings focus to two examples of the intersections between ethics and legal issues impacting culturally diverse clients. At the end of the chapter, two case examples are provided along with ethical considerations. Finally, a resource table is provided listing various ethical and practice guidelines for practitioners and students to utilize when working with culturally diverse clients.