"...but you are doing nothing to prevent others from being raped etc and ending up in the same situatuion and requiring even more mittigation."

I'm doing nothing in areas of prevention? I'd send you my resume, Dickey, but with 35 years (and counting) of both micro and macro practice, it takes awhile to get through.

I do confess, however, that I did not offer to go to the motel and beat up the manager or remove his hands and cojones. But according to your view of the root causes of poverty being bad values and bad choices, the root cause of not being poor must be good values and good choices. The manager, the Dad and the step-brother are/were financially comfortable. Your internal logic dictates that their values and choices are therefore good.

I do believe you have watched too many 'Ozzie and Harriet' reruns.

It also interesting to me that you assume that work with individuals is nothing but mitigatory.

Reality 101: People are people. People with resources are not morally superior to people without resources. People without resources are no more likely to make bad choices (when they have choices between good and bad choices) than are people with resources. The primary difference, when it does come down to making a poor choice when a good is available is this - resources protect people from the consequences of the bad choices they make. When your middle-class neighbor's kid gets in trouble for drugs, you may never know about it. And - that kid will probably get a deferred prosecution while Daddy sends him to rehab. 5 blocks over, on the other side of the tracks, the drug bust will be in the newspapaer and all names of participants will be published. That kid's father, who works hard cleaning the floors in your high-rise office building, won't have the money for a good lawyer or the resources for rehab. His kid will go to jail.

Reality 101: People without resources do not have the same array of choices as do people with resources. People without resources are much more likely to have to choice between the lesser of two evils.

Reality 101: One can not learn to differentiate between a good and bad choice, much less learn to make a good choice, when there are limited or no good choices available in the learning environment.