According to the association, its CP reporting hotline fields thousands of reports each month from web surfers who encounter illegal images of child sexual abuse and exploitation on the Internet. ASACP investigates these reports to determine the hosting, billing, IP address, ownership, and linkage of suspected CP sites.
The resulting Red Flag reports are automatically sent to domestic and international agencies including the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC), and relevant law enforcement agencies (FBI, Homeland Security, etc).
While the ASACP hotline was founded in 1996, the current tracking method only dates back to 2003 when the system was upgraded. The white paper will be based on data collected from 2004 to 2009.
"At the end of 2009 the ASACP suspected CP reporting hotline had collected a full five years of data and just recently processed 500,000 reports under our current technology systems," Tim Henning, ASACP's Technology and Forensic Research Director, stated. "Because of this we felt it would be beneficial to analyze and share this data publicly, in the form of a white paper."
"I am confident that the information will further advance online child protection efforts by those organizations worldwide that fight to protect children and eliminate child pornography from the Internet," Henning added. "It is only by collaborating and sharing data that we can hope to be successful in these important efforts."
The data from the hotline proves that the adult industry is not involved in child pornography and can be very useful to law enforcement in understanding how CP is distributed.
For example, of the 88,345 raw reports that ASACP investigated in 2009, 540 were actual new and unique confirmed commercial CP websites. Three were legal adult websites and not CP; 8,761 were non-websites such as P2P, bit torrent, file hosting sites, newsgroups, web communities, chat/message boards, instant messaging and IRC chat rooms; 9,256 reports were not determined to be CP; 19 were artistic renderings of children and not actually children; 941 were fully clothed modeling sites; 2,252 had bad URLs or the site was down before ASACP could investigate; 16,310 reports were spam; and 50,256 were duplicate reports.
Understanding how child pornographers host CP on the Internet and profit from it by abusing legitimate hosting and billing companies is essential to understanding how to stop the flow of money and eventually eliminate commercial CP. Data collected from ASACP's CP hotline provides important information such as the top five countries hosting commercial CP websites and the top five countries hosting billing for CP websites.
From 2004 to 2009, the United States was the top country hosting commercial CP websites with 39.1 percent. The remainder of the top five counties included Spain with 20.5 percent, Russia with 19.5 percent, the Netherlands with 9.5 percent, Ukraine with 4.2 percent, and France with 3.9 percent. In 2009, the United States not only remained in the top position for countries hosting commercial CP websites, it increased to 49.4 percent. France became the country to host the second most commercial CP websites with 12.5 percent, followed by Russia with 12.2 percent, Canada with 8.6 percent, the U.K. with 7.8 percent, and the Netherlands with 7.4 percent.
The United States was also the top country hosting billing for commercial CP Websites between 2004 and 2009 with 12.5 percent. The remainder of the top five counties included Panama with 9.6 percent, Spain with 7.1 percent, the Czech Republic with 2.9 percent, and the U.K. with 2.8 percent. In 2009, Spain became the top country hosting billing for commercial CP websites with 25.5 percent. The United States dropped to second with 12.6 percent, followed by the U.K. with 7.8 percent, the Netherlands with 7.6 percent, and Japan with 2.5 percent.
ASACP's CP Reporting Hotline White Paper will analyze these hosting and billing trends. In addition, the white paper will include data and an analysis of the global aspect of online child pornography content, an analysis of CP domain registration by server location, and current trends.
ASACP's CP Reporting Hotline White Paper is expected to be available in May of this year. ASACP also provides basic statistics from its CP Hotline on its website at.
Founded in 1996, ASACP is a non-profit organization dedicated to online child protection. ASACP comprises of two separate corporate entities, the Association of Sites Advocating Child Protection and the ASACP Foundation.
The Association of Sites Advocating Child Protection (ASACP) is a 501(c)(4) social welfare organization. ASACP manages a membership program that provides resources to companies in order to help them protect children online.
The ASACP Foundation is a 501(c)(3) charitable organization. The ASACP Foundation battles child pornography through its CP Reporting Hotline and helps parents prevent children from viewing age-restricted material online with its Restricted To Adults (RTA) website label.
ASACP is the only association in the world that coordinates the adult entertainment industry's efforts to protect children online. It has spent more than 14 years creating progressive programs to protect children and its relationship in assisting the adult industry's child protection efforts is unparalleled.
Companies and individuals interested in supporting ASACP may go to www.asacp.org for more information on how to get involved.