In 1991, Cottonwood County assistant attorney Victor Vieth prosecuted a man charged with child sex abuse. He lost the case. Big time.

“Everything went wrong. We didn’t know how to interview children, how to interrogate a suspect, how to get corroborating evidence,” Vieth said.

Out of the failure grew a program that today teaches thousands of police, lawyers and child-protection workers how to better identify and prosecute abusers.

Vieth will get more national exposure in conjunction with Monday’s State of the Union address. Vieth, head of the National Child Protection Training Center, will attend the president’s address and will talk to congressional delegations while in Washington. He was invited by 1st Dist. U.S. Rep. Tim Walz of Mankato.

The 5-year-old training center at Winona State University has been teaching its model across the nation.

They provide a five-day course for investigators on interviewing young abuse victims and on building a good case. They train 10,000 people a year and have programs in 21 states. “That means 1 million kids reporting sexual abuse will be interviewed by one of these trained investigators.”

The center also spearheaded creation of a child-protection studies program that has been approved by the state university system and is being implemented at colleges across the country.

“For the first time, students in law enforcement, law, social work can get a minor in child protection. We hope to have it in 500 universities in 10 years.”

The need for training people before they get into careers in which they sometimes deal with child abuse grew out of Vieth’s losing court case 16 years ago.

“We didn’t have the training. Professionals had to acquire the skills after they were on the job.”

Vieth said that after the lost case, people from agencies and groups across Cottonwood County came together to create a better child-protection system. The project worked and began to gain state and national attention.

“Within three years we’d imprisoned twice as many people as we had in the previous 12 years.”

Vieth started his career in Watonwan County in 1988, then went to Cottonwood County until 1997.

Vieth said he’s proud to be invited to the State of the Union and proud of the state’s congressional delegation, which fought for increased funding for the center. A couple of years ago, the center got $300,000 in federal funding. This year, the center will get $1.2 million in federal funds. It also gets state and private funding.

“Elected officials take a lot of criticism. But the Minnesota delegation has supported this in a bipartisan way. Preventing child sex abuse isn’t something you get elected or re-elected for. Here’s an example where our state delegation did something that won’t help them politically, but it helps the country.”