The online child pornography reporting hotline operated by the Association of Sites Advocating Child Protection (ASACP) has now processed more than 200,000 reports.

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. The ASACP hotline is easy to find, since queries for terms like “report child pornography” inevitably find ASACP’s website ranked high among search engine results. This is in part due to the many ASACP member sites that link back to www.asacp.org.

ASACP investigates these “raw” 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 and groups such as the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC).

ASACP Compliance Director Tim Henning oversees the hotline, and has been with ASACP almost since its inception in 1996. According to Henning, the hotline originally received only 10 to 15 reports per day. “Back then all submissions received hand-typed responses,” he said. “Validated reports were emailed to the authorities. But then as ASACP gained more and more exposure and support from adult companies, the number of sites linking to the hotline increased rapidly – and so did the volume of incoming reports. Today we’re also able to track and document hotline trends and statistics automatically, which means we can identify new scams and tactics used by CP operators.”