Violence Against Women Resource Guide

Table of Contents

Purpose of the Resource Guide

This Violence Against Women (VAW) Resource Guide was designed by the National Archive of Criminal Justice Data (NACJD) staff to provide easy access to data collections on the topic of violence against women, such as Quick Links to certain types of VAW studies and links to studies available for online data analysis. This resource guide also provides useful information for the secondary analysis of these data collections, such as customized help pages for complex data collections, information about how to obtain restricted access data, and links to funding opportunities and publications.

Sources of the VAW Data at NACJD

Many of these data collections are sponsored by the Violence Against Women and Family Violence (VAW&FV) Research and Evaluation program at the National Institute of Justice (NIJ). This program aims to promote the safety of women and family members, and to increase the efficiency and effectiveness of the criminal justice system's response to these crimes. More information about this program can be found at the VAW&FV website.

Their preservation and dissemination through NACJD is also sponsored by the National Institute of Justice Data Resources Program (DRP). In 1984 NIJ established the DRP to ensure the preservation and availability of research and evaluation data collected through NIJ-funded research. NACJD archives these data collections to support new research, replicate original findings, or test new hypotheses based on existing NIJ-funded data collections.

VAW Data Collection Highlights

International and Domestic Trends in Sex Trafficking of Women in the United States, 1999-2000 (ICPSR 3438)
Janice G. Raymond and Donna M. Hughes
Coalition Against Trafficking Women

This study was the first to research both contemporary international and domestic trafficking of women for sexual exploitation in the United States and to include primary research information from interviews with trafficked and prostituted women in the sex industry. Telephone and personal interviews were conducted with people who had experience with or knowledge of sex trafficking in the United States. This data collection consists of the verbatim questions and responses in 107 data files from the following groups of individuals who were interviewed: (1) international and United States women who had been or were in the sex industry in the United States, (2) law enforcement officials who had experience and expertise in sex-industry related cases or immigration, (3) social service workers who provided services to women in prostitution or might have come into contact with women from the sex industry and those providing services to immigrant populations, and (4) health care workers who provided services to women in prostitution or who may have come into contact with women in the sex industry.

Quick Links to VAW Data

The following Quick Links were created to facilitate access to Violence Against Women data collections at NACJD. These collections can also be found through our Discover Data web page.

Online Survey Documentation and Analysis

A selection of NACJD data collections is available for use with our online Survey Documentation and Analysis (SDA). This means that users can perform the following tasks without having to download the entire collection and importing it into a statistical package:

  • Search for variables of interest in a dataset
  • Review frequencies or summary statistics of key variables to determine what further analyses are appropriate
  • Review frequencies or summary statistics for missing data
  • Produce simple summary statistics for reports
  • Create statistical tables from raw data
  • Create a subset of cases or variables from a particularly large collection to save downloading time and space on a personal computer

VAW data collections available for online analysis

Learn more about the online analysis system

Human Subjects Issues

NACJD employs a variety of measures to ensure that subject confidentiality is preserved in all of our data collections. Due to the sensitive nature of data collected about violence against women, many of these data collections are restricted from general access. This means that these data are still freely available to the public, but they cannot simply be downloaded from the NACJD website. Access to restricted data collections is possible through a written request to NACJD. Using a Data Transfer Agreement, available online as a PDF file, prospective data users must certify in writing that the data will be used for research or statistical purposes only, and that the confidentiality of respondents or subjects will be protected. More information about the procedures for accessing these data is available on the Restricted Data Resources web page.

Funding Opportunities

NIJ provides two types of funding for Violence Against Women Research:

  1. NIJ's Violence Against Women and Family Violence program provides funds for research and evaluation, including research fellowships. The program's objectives are to estimate the scope of violence against women and family violence, identify their causes and consequences, evaluate promising prevention and intervention programs, disseminate research results to the field, and build partnerships among a wide variety of disciplines to accomplish these objectives.

  2. NIJ's Data Resources Program provides funding for the secondary analysis of existing data collections. The program seeks applicants to conduct original research using data from NACJD, especially data from previously funded NIJ projects.

Details regarding the application procedures for both types of funding can be found at NIJ's Funding Opportunities.

Publications

NACJD makes criminal justice data available to the public for secondary analysis. We do not generally archive, produce, or distribute published reports, statistics, charts, or other analyses based upon data holdings.

Users interested in such publications can search our online database of citations for publications related to NACJD data collections. Many of the publications listed in the online database are available in either paper hardcopy or electronic form from the National Criminal Justice Reference Service.

Other publications on the subject of violence against women can be found within the NIJ Publications Listing.