Saying her group was received very graciously once again, Adult Sites Against Child Pornography (ASACP) executive director Joan Irvine said her second annual trip to the Internet Hotline Providers in Europe (INHOPE) conference in Rome last month continued a positive dialogue between Europe's child protection hotlines and the U.S.-based child-porn fighting Website.
"To me, it's about the communication," Irvine told AVNOnline.com. "It's about the learning. You learn about some of the type of reporting they're doing that we're not doing, you learn about some of the statistics and the way they're handling them. We are actually changing some of the ways we are doing our reporting because of information from them."
Irvine also got tips on instructing people on how not to report child porn, saying that INHOPE confirmed for her that the only way a group like ASACP can provide proof that someone reported a child porn-suspect site to the group is if a subpoena is issued.
"We received an e-mail from someone who said they were being prosecuted in Hong Kong for child porn," she said, "and they had been searching the Net for information to pass to us. He wanted proof of his report. And since he did not include an e-mail, and ASACP does not seek tracking of [Internet protocols], we had nothing to cross-reference. Plus, our commitment is that this information is confidential. Therefore, the only way we could even provide that information is if there was some subpoena requiring that information. And we were able to verify that with an INHOPE [member] hotline."
That same exchange provoked Irvine to remind people they should not actively hit the Internet hunting for child porn to report – because it could get them in legal hot water similar to that experienced by, among others, Peter Townshend, the leader of the Who, whose research into the subject over a year ago got him on a British sex offender registry, even though authorities finally agreed with his contention that his interest was research-oriented.
Irvine also said the INHOPE conference helped introduce her to a new reporting standard aimed at cutting repetition and perhaps getting more attention from law enforcement authorities to whom ASACP and others turn over information. That standard involves marking new reports on previously-reported sites.
"Our system initially was set up so that, if we got a report in, our system would check to see if it had already been reported before," she said. "If it has been, it puts it into our database but it doesn't present it to our [site] reviewer. And we'd get 250 reports of the same site in a day, sometimes, and you don't want to keep giving that to the reviewer.
"So that's a change we made in our system," she continued. "What's a standard code of practice with INHOPE is, if they get a report in, and that report had been submitted more than a month before that, it's considered a new report and they check it out. We're adopting that [procedure] for ASACP. "
This new standard, Irvine said, will alter ASACP's official reporting figures somewhat – but for the good. "Because just last month, we had 5,200 reports, and only 300 of those were sent on to FBI and National Center for Missing and Exploited Children and INHOPE hotlines," she said. "How many of those 5,200 were duplicates? But now, what we're going to find out is, whatever percentage of those reports were duplicates, if they were duplicates of something more than a month old, we will be re-reviewing that site as if it really was a new report. And it may actually increase the number of reports we do send to the authorities."
Irvine's attendance at the INHOPE conference also opened the way for ASACP's technical officer and site reviewer to share knowledge with, among others, a Swedish technician involved in similar report tracking. "You get to share knowledge and, if there's something we're doing that's unique, it will be shared with people in INHOPE," she said. "This way, ASACP will be having consistent technical dialogue and learning from where people at other hotlines are doing. And I think that's really the purpose of being connected with an association such as INHOPE. Because we all have the same goal."
INHOPE, for its part, received ASACP graciously and seemed impressed by the group's software development and other child porn reporting techniques and strategies. "They are as every other mainstream group that we speak to," Irvine said. "They are amazed at what the adult entertainment industry is doing to self-regulate."
But Irvine and INHOPE delegates discussed other child abuse related Internet issues, especially one which astounded Irvine: Websites INHOPE said have encouraged young men and women to become anorexic or bulimic, almost as if it were a cultish kind of thing rather than a dangerous health problem.
"They have mantras, they have all these things," Irvine said. "By discovering this, the hotlines were able to work with the ISPs like Yahoo and AOL to make sure they don't allow – they block these sites. There were anorexia and bulimia sites actually doing that, geared toward the younger people. Chat boards, people with suggestions on how to lose more weight – and most are blocked now, but INHOPE showed a couple of sites, almost like ‘it's better to be sickly thin.’ All this stuff that was absolutely horrendous."
