Melissa Carter’s presentation was extremely captivating.  Her segment on the 2013 reaction to tragedy and all the tragic children stories, especially the children killed by their parents surprised me the most. I know these tragedies happen often, I just haven’t followed much of these stories in the media; so, I was astonished when informed of the child maltreatment deaths.   Melissa made a great point to mention how these tragedies can be a constant rotation, where we would find a solution, but in the end can’t prevent these events from occurring.  Welfare services providing prevention strategies based on different age groups was interesting enough to learn.  I naturally thought that all child victims were possibly taught the same coping mechanisms , but it makes since to teach a 5 year-old how to cope with their situation different from a 14 year-old.  This years’ Georgia legislative had all the streams open. However, due to the legislative moving extremely fast, a lot of legislatives  would be push to the side because there wasn’t enough time to come to an agreement.  Basically, the politicians were out for self again, focusing on how they can benefit from passing certain bills.  The single most important thing we can do to improve the creation of social policy in the area of social work is to advocate.  We need to continue to address the issues happening to these children.  It’s important that we spread the word of these cases, hoping to gain additional supporters.  It is unfortunate that people really don’t know what’s going on or care to know about what’s going on until these child maltreatment tragedies happen in their own backyards.