"What we've been saying for years may soon enough become the law," Adult Sites Against Child Pornography executive director Joan Irvine says about a new anti-child porn bill passed without objection by the U.S. Senate earlier this week.
The group mostly applauds the new bill, but Irvine laments that the adult Internet didn't do more to clean up its own house before the government decided to think about stepping in and doing the job for it. "It would have been nice," she tells AVN Online, "if the adult industry had self-regulated."
The bill passed without objection February 24 and requires anyone charged in a child porn case to prove their material didn't depict real children. That requirement caused Free Speech Coalition's Bill Lyons and Chicago attorney Joseph Obenberger to question whether it was sound policy for the government to shift away from the long-held presumption that the burden of proof in any criminal case fell upon the government. That's a concern Irvine shares.
"Parts of this bill are absolutely fantastic, from the anti-child porn perspective, but from the free speech perspective and the power that it's giving the government, I have a real concern," Irvine says. "They're saying exactly what we've been saying for ages. And maybe now, those adult sites that have not been listening to it, although a majority of them have been, need to start to do something. Otherwise, they're going to cause the whole industry problems."
Irvine says she'd hoped that the government might take note of the preponderance of adult Internet sites that have been working the extra degrees to cast out the child porn, rather than the very small minority of what she calls "renegade" sites that seem not to care.
Child porn, she says, is "an outcast. It's not part of the proper adult industry. Just like this one man who complained that when he took off what other Website people told him was unacceptable, how the hits dropped to eight thousand from twenty thousand? The (proper adult) industry will not tolerate, and has not, in general, and definitely cannot afford to tolerate any of that, if they want to maintain their business."
Last year, the Supreme Court ruled that banning adult images because the models or actors looked young enough to be mistaken for underage children was unconstitutional. But Irvine thinks a lot of adult Net sites may take that question a lot more seriously now with this new bill, which supporters say addressed and answered the issues raised in last year's Supreme Court ruling.
"(We) and most of the adult industry have been saying clean up your act or the government will," she continues. "And, guess what - it is. It's important for the adult site industry to self-regulate, which is one of (ASACP's) purposes."
ASACP sent out a formal statement late Wednesday urging both its member Websites and all in the adult Internet to comply with U.S. and European child porn laws, report suspected child porn at once to ASACP, enforce strict compliance with model release licensing regulations, avoid keywords that could suggest child porn - including words like "pre-teen" or any form of "lolita" - and do business only with companies willing to abide by the ASACP code of ethics, which you can read on their Website.
