Talking tragedy

Just a few days after the Boston Marathon bombing last year, lecturer Betsy McAlister Groves was asked to meet with a group of residents who lived on the same street as Martin Richards, the 8-year-old who had been killed by one of the bombs. The parents wanted Groves, a licensed clinical social worker and founding director of the Child Witness to Violence Project at Boston Medical Center, to help them figure out how to help their own children cope in the aftermath. “It was a very hard conversation,” she says.

Last week, in light of the anniversary of the bombing, Groves spoke again, this time to the Ed School community. Her talk, “Helping Children with Scary and Stressful Events,” included her experience after the tragedy, both as a social worker and a parent, as well as her advice for the mostly student audience — some who had direct connections to the marathon tragedy.