ASACP educates members, the online adult entertainment industry, international government policy makers, and the public about online child safety, child exploitation, and the efforts of the online adult entertainment industry to battle child sexual abuse and be proactive with internet child safety issues.
Fostering connections with all relevant stakeholders helps ASACP protect children while safeguarding the interests of the online adult entertainment industry: by —among other things— providing a steady stream of “Red Flag” reports to authorities and other relevant agencies, along with various forensic services of use to investigators and the criminal justice system, criminals are brought to justice; while the association offers authorities and other relevant agencies support in way of educational and support services to help them better understand the workings of the legitimate and legal adult entertainment industry.
ASACP’s government outreach takes place through various media and includes personal interaction with stakeholders at governmental events.
Since 2004 the child exploitation hotline has processed more than 740,000 reports and released a report that dissected five years of data from its Child Pornography Reporting Hotline. One of the conclusions of this paper proves that the adult entertainment industry is not involved with child pornography. This report was submitted to, the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) Online Safety Technology Workgroup and was referenced in their final report as well as several other relevant stakeholders in government and policy circles. ASACP continues to stay on the cutting edge of technology by introducing new approaches to better isolate and investigate the highest of priority reports and thereby placing this crucial information into the hands of law enforcement even more efficiently.
In 2006, ASACP created the award-winning RTA (“Restricted to Adults”) label to better enable parental filtering, and to demonstrate the online adult industry’s commitment to helping parents prevent children from viewing age-inappropriate content. Embedding the RTA label code in page header metadata tags enables filtering via the various parental control mechanisms that are widely available to parents. The RTA label is recognized by the majority of filtering products and services, and ASACP continues to pursue partnerships. RTA is recognized by the parental controls in both Microsoft and Apple browsers, including browser use on mobile devices. The RTA label can even be used to tag individual social networking site user pages, blogs, and mobile apps that feature adult material.
The RTA label is completely free to use, voluntary, and universally available to any website that wishes to label itself clearly and effectively as being inappropriate for viewing by minors. Using RTA requires no online form to fill out, no registration, and no fee. RTA does not differentiate between the various types of age-inappropriate content available; all content considered unsuitable for minors is simply labeled “Restricted to Adults.”
Within a year of its release in 2006, more than 3 million web pages had been labeled using the RTA tag. Now the RTA label is in use on some 30 million web pages containing age-restricted content including the most highly trafficked adult entertainment websites in the world.
ASACP’s government outreach takes place through various media and includes personal interaction with stakeholders at governmental events — providing an irreplaceable but resource-intensive platform for networking and the exchange of information. The benefits of this activism are tangible and revealing, however, providing a worthwhile return on ASACP’s substantial investment in travel and event attendance.
ASACP’s proactive leadership has helped the online adult entertainment industry to thrive in an environment where crippling legislation has not been forthcoming and where the onus of child protection is rightfully split between parents and content providers.
This leadership will carry forward in 2013 — as the Internet, along with the needs of various businesses that profit from it, including those in the adult entertainment industry, evolve.
For more information, contact tim@asacp.org.
