Saying she hopes to learn what other world hotlines attribute to a rise in reports of child porn, Adult Sites Against Child Pornography executive director Joan Irvine will attend this year's Internet Hotline Providers in Europe (INHOPE) conference in Rome May 11-14.
"I've only been to one meeting, and ASACP is not a full member yet," said Irvine, who attended last year's gathering as well, "but there are more hotlines applying for membership, so, obviously, more countries are getting involved with this effort."
Irvine said INHOPE stays atop what happens in the child porn fight on an international basis and tries to educate members on how to stay "ahead of the sick people who try to exploit children.
"For example, last fall one day was spent on 3G technology and how video cell phones would be the next delivery/contact method since they had already seen problems in Japan," she continued, referring to third-generation cellular telephones capable of handling video content but often feared to be new avenues for purveying child porn. "This time they plan to discuss 'age verification" - a big issue everywhere. Germany had to deal with this, so there should be some information based on actual experiences."
Irvine said she learns plenty from INHOPE that she can bring back to ASACP. "At the last meeting, they were surprised that the [adult Internet] industry had best practices. This meeting, they will be blown away with our new compliance system."
The INHOPE agenda this year will include dealing with content, codes of practice, statistics, personal mobile devices, staff welfare, and Internet protocol address hijacking, as well as age verification systems.
Irvine's travel to the INHOPE meeting comes just after ASACP reported that they had drawn over 4,600 suspect child porn reports in April and continues experiencing a big increase in the number of reports. Out of those 4,600, ASACP said, over 300 produced sites turned in to authorities, well above the previous average of 100 per month.
"I believe that we are seeing this increase in raw and validated reports as a result of more than one factor," said ASACP site reviewer Tim Henning. "New search engine technology, the ever increasing amount of unwanted spam email, rapidly growing awareness of ASACP both on-line and in mainstream media, and a growing proliferation of child pornography sites are all contributing to the increase."
The disturbing problem with the rise in reports, ASACP said, is that it means more validated new child porn content previously undetected, whereas much of the content in the past had not been original but seen too many times in too many duplications.
"As the numbers of child pornography sites grow," Irvine said announcing the new reporting figures, "there seems to be more competition for customers and more pressure to provide new content for those customers. Sadly, this can only mean one thing: more innocent children are being abused to provide this illegal content."
Irvine also spoke of Thursday morning's House Subcommittee on Commerce, Trade, and Consumer Protection hearing on adult material online and peer-to-peer technology's actual or alleged connection to it. She said the hearing showed among other things that it's still too easy for the mainstream world to lump child porn with legitimate adult entertainment, "and, on top of all this, they blame all the problems on the adult industry."
But she also said that the professional adult industry isn't responsible for most of the illegal content crossing the P2P networks - echoing comments from P2P United executive director Adam Eisgrau, who told AVNOnline.com after the hearing that he had hoped to clarify for the lawmakers that P2P networks are not content providers.
P2P United also told the subcommittee they were looking to start a program derived from the famed milk-carton campaign for finding missing children, a program in which pictures of suspected child pornographers would be posted somehow on P2P networks.
"If [lawmakers and other mainstream figures] would look at the facts," Irvine said, "they would see that the professional adult industry is not responsible for the majority of the illegal content on P2P... [And], children are not their market."
Irvine also said ASACP has a new compliance system letting it monitor Approved Members and Sponsor Members on a 24/7 basis, using keyword spidering. And the group "very shortly" will be able to use hashed files of child porn images to spider against member sites. "As usual," she said, "the [adult] industry is incorporating leading-edge technology to the advantage of society as a whole."
