The origin of one of the most important Web sites on violence and abuse goes back to the adolescence of the Internet. In late 1994 professor Jeffrey Edleson of the School of Social Work loaded a copy of the free MOSAIC Web browser onto his home computer. "I couldn't believe what I found that night," said Edleson. "I discovered the Internet world beyond Gopher and e-mail."

In the following weeks he copied HTML code from the Web pages he found and created a page with links to the few Internet resources on violence against women that were available at the time. "I kept adding links over the coming months, quickly having to re-sort them, and eventually building subpages for specific areas of content," he noted. As the burgeoning Web site took shape, others wanted Edleson to post their documents on his site. So he handed over site maintenance to a graduate student while he coded and posted his own newest research manuscripts.

At the time Edleson was the principal investigator of the state-funded Higher Education Center Against Violence and Abuse (HECAVA). The center, which later changed its name to the Minnesota Center Against Violence and Abuse (MINCAVA), was established to improve the quality of higher education related to violence prevention. Posting documents online was a side project for Edleson, now the center's director. But over the ensuing decade the side project has evolved into the MINCAVA Electronic Clearinghouse, one of the most comprehensive and widely used resources of violence-related material on the Internet. Over 2,300 unique users per day from over 30 countries use the clearinghouse.

A grassroots community

In 1992 the Minnesota legislature directed the Higher Education Coordinating Board to survey recent Minnesota college graduates to evaluate the adequacy of the professional education they had received about violence and abuse. Based on the survey results, HECAVA was created to work in cooperation with colleges and organizations statewide to revise the preparation, licensing, and continuing education of a wide range of professions. The improved education programs helped prepare professionals to provide safety and services to victims of violence, hold perpetrators accountable for their actions, and address the root causes of violence.

As HECAVA's education work progressed, the electronic clearinghouse continued to grow. "Initially the Web site was for academic faculty who taught professional students about violence and abuse," said Edleson. But as others discovered the site, it became a meeting place for a grassroots community. According to Ann Kranz, MINCAVA program director, "the clearinghouse quickly evolved because its users helped to shape its content. It became a primary source of violence-related information for all types of users because people were hungry for new material that was easily accessible. MINCAVA's users willingly shared their content with each other and consequently supplied new resources to people across the globe who were accessing the site."

The clearinghouse now allows automated submission of a wide range of violence-related documents, including survivor and service provider resources, educational syllabi, published research, funding sources, upcoming training events, and searchable databases of training manuals, videos, and other educational resources.

With the growth of the clearinghouse, the center's reputation for online expertise also grew. In 1997 the U.S. Department of Justice's Office of Violence Against Women commissioned the center to create an electronic repository of full-text documents. The ensuing Web site, Violence Against Women Online Resources (VAWOR), uses a MINCAVA-developed interactive, online review process to route documents through VAWOR's 25-member national advisory board. The site currently hosts nearly 300 papers, reports, research findings, curricula, presentations, training manuals, and multi-media resources related to violence against women.

For the federal government, VAWOR ensures that products developed with funds from the Violence Against Women Act are made widely available to advocates, prosecutors, police, judges, probation officers, and related professionals. For criminal justice professionals and battered women advocates, having fast, reliable, cost-effective access to high quality training and resource materials is invaluable, particularly with recent budget shortfalls and shrinking resources.

More than Web sites

While people from all over the world seek information from MINCAVA's online resources, the center stays grounded to its original education mission. It helped launch a certificate program in child abuse prevention studies, an undergraduate minor in family violence prevention, and interactive online training tools used by students and professionals throughout the country. One training tool, the Global Violence Prevention case study, presents users with effective ways to respond to victims and perpetrators and provides current research and programmatic resources.

The center also conducts research through the Link Project and the applied research forum of the National Electronic Network on Violence Against Women (VAWnet). The Link Project is a series of projects studying the experiences of families in which mothers and their children have both been maltreated, and seeks to build collaborative relationships between child protection, domestic violence agencies, and court services. MINCAVA's participation in VAWnet, a CDC-funded online resource, focuses on the creation of research summaries for use by practitioners working on the issues of domestic violence, sexual assault, and stalking.

All of this work--the Web sites, education, and research-would not exist without initial funding from the Minnesota legislature and continued funding from the Office of Violence Against Women. But much of what the center does today stems from that night in 1994. "The growing attention MINCAVA's Web sites received led us to expand our mission to provide access to the available information," said Edleson. "Now faculty and students, community activists, and victims and their families from all parts of Minnesota, the United States, and the world use our resources."

To visit MINCAVA's main Web site, go to www.mincava.umn.edu.

WRITTEN BY BRIAN LIEB