LAS VEGAS -- Joan Irvine knows she's preaching to the choir, and she tells her audience as much. But she's talking to an unusual group -- pornographers who want to stop Internet kiddie porn.
Granted, at the moment her audience is small. Irvine, the new executive director of Adult Sites Against Child Pornography, sits on a dais in Las Vegas before maybe 50 listeners. Only 15 minutes earlier the same hall at the Internext convention was jammed with entrepreneurs listening to another panel on how to make money off peer-to-peer piracy of adult online content.
Irvine is undeterred. She insists that the Internet porn industry, which generates $3 billion annually, must address the issue of child pornography. And she says that the people attending Internext, an annual confab for the Internet porn business, can "do more than anyone else" to stamp out the problem.
To that end, she's spent the week recruiting porn site owners to join her association and submit their sites for review by her advisory board. If no objectionable content is found on a site, she says, she will bestow "a sort of Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval for the adult entertainment industry" so the site can advertise on its homepage that it is free of kiddie porn. Customers, she promises, will feel more confident shopping on sites with such a seal.
The ASACP doesn't just reject child-porn content but also the suggestion of it. The group refuses its seal to any site that uses certain "unacceptable words" as keywords for search engines or as part of promotions on the actual homepage. The list, compiled by major ASACP sponsor Sex.Com, features terms in 23 languages and includes such words as "lolitas," "kinderporno" and "pedolandia."
"We know we (in this industry) do not put out child porn; we put out adult content," insists Irvine, hired as the ASACP's first executive director after leaving her post as vice president for Virtual International Community, an association of new media and digital professionals. "But when I see, as I do all too often, a 3-year-old or a 4-year-old being penetrated in a film, it just fills my eyes with tears. That is what we must stop."
To stop it, the group routinely reports such material to the FBI and local police agencies. In December alone, ASACP says it sent 1,200 tips to the FBI. More than 10,000 sites have been reported to law enforcement and more than 6,100 have been shut down, Irvine says.
Such cooperation can help inoculate the porn industry from assaults by prudish legislators and bureaucrats, says William Lyon, executive director of the Free Speech Coalition, the industry's lobbying group.
"The government does not want us in business, period," Lyon said. "They don't care if we have cleaner sites. They use the child-porn issue as the linchpin for bringing down the adult industry. If we don't police ourselves, they'll do it for us."
While some of the largest online porn purveyors have thrown their support behind ASCAP and its Good Housekeeping-style seal, others remain skeptical about allowing anyone to review their content. The vast majority of online kiddie porn is created and propagated by sites in Europe and Asia where the ASACP is powerless, critics note.
"I don't think that that is really necessary," says Gail Harris, chief executive officer for FalconFoto, a company that produces naked pictures and images for major men's magazines like High Society and Barely Legal. "We already protect our sites so that children can't look in and then, on the other end, we're making sure that we don't have minors in our content.
"The entire adult business is already so much against child pornography. It's immoral and not what we're about."
