As part of my job I'm faced everyday with safeguarding the vulnerable young people I work with.  The difficulty with it though, is that sometimes they don't want to be safeguarded.  An outsider would probably initially think that those young people weren't quite 'right', and be wondering why that person would ever not want to be helped out of a bad situation.  Today I had one of those incidents... We were duty bound to break confidentiality in order to safeguard this particular young person which was against their wishes.  For them the situation they are currently in is the perceived less of two evils. 

At what point do we decide we know what's best for someone?  I mean this as a general question as opposed to being just about this incident.  Why do we feel we know what is the right thing to do because we've placed ourselves in a position of assumed authority, or because we're older, or even because we work for the government?  Where did all the empowerment and autonomy go?