Los Angeles, CA (March 25, 2010) – The Association of Sites Advocating Child Protection (ASACP) is preparing a white paper to discuss essential data from its Child Pornography (CP) Reporting hotline that can be utilized in the fight against commercial CP.

ASACP’s online 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. Red Flag reports are then automatically forwarded to domestic and international agencies, the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC), and law enforcement (FBI, Homeland Security, etc).

While the ASACP hotline was founded in 1996, the current tracking method only goes back to 2003 when the system was upgraded. The data in the white paper will be based on data collected from 2004 to 2009.

ASACP Technology and Forensic Research Director Tim Henning stated, “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. 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 world wide that fight to protect children and eliminate child pornography from the internet. 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 industry is not involved in child pornography and it can also 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; 3 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 5 countries hosting commercial CP websites and the top 5 countries hosting billing for CP websites.

From 2004 to 2009 the United States was the top country hosting commercial CP Websites with 39.1%.  The remainder of the top 5 counties included Spain with 20.5%, Russia with 19.5%, Netherlands with 9.5%, Ukraine with 4.2%, and France with 3.9%.  In 2009, the United States not only remained in the top position for countries hosting commercial CP websites, it increased to 49.4%.  France became the country to host the second most commercial CP websites with 12.5%, followed by Russia with 12.2 %, Canada with 8.6 %, the UK with 7.8 %, and the Netherlands with 7.4 %.

The United States was also the top country hosting billing for commercial CP Websites between 2004 and 2009 with 12.5%.  The remainder of the top 5 counties included Panama with 9.6%, Spain with 7.1%, the Czech Republic with 2.9%, and the UK with 2.8%.  In 2009, Spain became the top country hosting billing for commercial CP websites with 25.5 %.  The United States dropped to second with 12.6%, followed by the UK with 7.8%, the Netherlands with 7.6%, and Japan with 2.5%.

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: http://www.asacp.org/index.php?content=statistics.

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 over 14 years creating progressive programs to protect children. ASACP’s 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.