In a statement issued today, ASACP Executive Director Joan Irvine claimed that the proposed 2257 amendments – that went into effect on June 23 except for current Free Speech Coalition members – will do nothing to stop the proliferation of child porn based on data from its CP hotline.
Asserting that the professional adult entertainment industry is “not involved with child pornography,” Irvine backed up her statement by claiming that 99.9 percent of CP hotline reports can be attributed to non-adult webmasters or pedophiles, not professional adult companies.
According to the DOJ in its recently revised 2257 documents, minors are incapable of consenting to perform in sexually explicit depictions and are often forced to engage in sexually explicit conduct. For these reasons, visual depictions of sexually explicit conduct that involve persons under the age of 18 constitute illegal child pornography.
But Irvine feels otherwise and has the data to support it.
“Adult companies already comply with the current laws; the criminals involved in CP don’t and never will,” Irvine said. “As I have said before, I wish the government would focus its time and financial resources on apprehending the real criminals and truly saving children.”
ASACP has processed more than 150,000 reports of suspected child pornography sites in the past two years alone, sharing its “red flag reports” with the government.
Among those reports processed over the last two years, states Irvine, only eight percent were “unique verifiable” child porn sites. Irvine added that in many ways, through the adoption of 2257 amendments that make it tougher for adult companies to maintain age verification records on content models, the DOJ is pointing the finger in the wrong direction.
According to Brandon Shalton, technology consultant for ASACP, on a daily average, ASACP processes 100-120 child porn leads, 5-10 of which actually end up being child porn. But, Shalton added, they are not adult entertainment websites and instead tend to generate from free hosting sites and servers outside of the country.
"We have empirical evidence to prove that the websites child porn occurs on are not adult entertainment domains," Shalton said.
Irvine added that all too often the government and various religious groups clump child porn with regular, consensual adult content, creating a damaging stigma for adult professionals.
"Most of the CP images that are distributed on the Internet are of young children less than 12 years old," Irvine said. "There is no way that professional adult content should even be compared to these horrific images."