LOS ANGELES - The online child-pornography-reporting hotline operated by the Association of Sites Advocating Child Protection processed its 250,000th report last Tuesday.
The hotline fields thousands of reports each month from Web surfers who believe they have encountered illegal images of child sexual abuse and exploitation. The ASACP investigates "raw" reports to determine the hosting, billing, IP address, ownership and linkage, then forwards the ones it believes are legitimate to agencies and groups such the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.
Since the hotline's inception in 1996, the FBI has reported an 878 percent increase in indictments and a 2,174 percent increase in arrests and summons for child pornography and sexual exploitation.
ASACP also is a member of the Financial Coalition Against Child Pornography and an active participant in its Analytical Working Group. This coalition of credit-card issuers and Internet-service companies works to eradicate commercial child pornography by denying financial processing to suspected abusers.
Founded in 1996, the ASACP is a nonprofit organization dedicated to eliminating child pornography from the Internet.
