ASACP has three key focal points that it embraces to accomplish its core mission. These nexus points converge to allow ASACP to throw a wide net that ultimately benefits all stake holders. My last two columns focused on the ASACP CP reporting hotline — fighting the heinous crime of online child pornography, and the award winning RTA (“Restricted to Adults”) labelling system — which better enables parental filtering, and demonstrates the online adult entertainment industry’s commitment to helping parents prevent children from viewing age-inappropriate content. This column will focus on the third key role ASACP plays in order to further its mission — education.

ASACP educates its members and sponsors, the international online adult entertainment industry, international government policy makers, educators, and parents about online child safety, child exploitation, and the efforts of the online adult entertainment industry to battle the heinous crime of child sexual abuse while also being proactive regarding online child safety issues. Mastering the difficult balancing act of bridging all of these interests might seem to be a challenging task — and it is — fortunately ASACP has an experienced, dedicated and expert team. It takes a truly caring group of individuals to be able to cope with the realities of such a demanding vocation.

ASACP educates its members and sponsors by providing a membership program that visually reviews all member and sponsor sites, spiders these sites for unacceptable terms and checks the URLs against the database of child pornography URLs ASACP collects via the cp reporting hotline. ASACP monitors these sites on an ongoing basis and cross-references them against new child pornography reports received in order to ensure these sites are not being abused by online CP traffickers.

ASACP further provides the online adult entertainment industry with industry best practices and its members and sponsors with a code of ethics all designed to provide a model of effective industry self-regulation. As the online adult industry’s leading trade association, ASACP’s business is as much about protecting your business as it is about protecting the children. This duality allows ASACP to keep children out of and away from adult entertainment, while ensuring that this message of responsible adult industry self-regulation is heard in Sacramento, in Washington, throughout the European Union, and beyond.

This advocacy illustrates that ASACP not only protects children, but the interests of legitimate providers of online adult entertainment. Proof of ASACP’s efficacy is detailed in its whitepaper, ASACP Hotline Report: Online Child Pornography Data and Analysis, which clearly outlines the scope of the association’s activities, the breakdown and disposition of CP Hotline reports, and the benefits it provides to a wide range of stakeholders. This document analyzes more than 400,000 reports of suspected child pornography that were received by the association’s CP Reporting Hotline during a recent five-year period and underscores ASACP’s success in combating commercial child pornography. An update to this white paper spanning two more years of CP hotline data is due out in the third quarter of 2012.

ASACP’s government outreach efforts are directed at policy makers as well as government advisors. ASACP responds to child protection issues — as they arise — that relate to the internet and the online adult entertainment industry, furthering the goals of government education. ASACP attends government and mainstream conferences that allow ASACP to interact with governmental agencies and advisors, as well as a variety of mainstream powerhouses. A leading voice in online child protection for the past 16 years, ASACP is the only child protection organization to work directly with legitimate providers of legal adult entertainment.

Supported by sponsor and membership fees as well as by donations to its Foundation, ASACP is at the forefront of online child-protection education that also protects businesses. Companies interested in learning about the variety of ways in which they can support ASACP in its mission should contact Tim Henning at tim@asacp.org.