Betsy McAlister Groves, MSW, LICSW is a licensed clinical social worker and founding Director of the Child Witness to Violence Project at Boston Medical Center. Her practice and research interests are on the impact of community and family violence on young children, and on engaging community systems in identifying and responding to children who are affected by violence in their environments. The Child Witness to Violence Project provides developmentally informed, trauma-focused intervention to young children and their parents who are affected by violence and other traumas. It receives funding as a site in the National Child Traumatic Stress Network to test a model of psychotherapeutic intervention for children and to disseminate information about early childhood trauma to schools, health settings and the criminal justice system. Ms. Groves holds an appointment as Associate Professor of Pediatrics at Boston University School of Medicine and she serves as Co-Director of the Child Protection Team at Boston Medical Center. She has served for the past 10 years on the Governor’s Commission on Domestic Violence and Sexual Assault of Massachusetts. In addition she has served in various advisory and consultative capacities for the US Department of Justice and the National Council of Juvenile and Family Court Judges. She is the author of a book, Children who See Too Much: Lessons from the Child Witness to Violence Project (2002), and has published extensively on topics related to childhood trauma and intervention.
Ms. Groves received her Master's degree from Boston University School of Social Work and her undergraduate degree from the College of William and Mary. She is the past recipient of a fellowship from the Open Society Institute and was a fellow at the Malcolm Weiner Center of Social Policy at Harvard University in 1999-2000.
