Prostasia Foundation

Prostasia seeks to champion the primary prevention of sexual harms to children, while upholding the rights of all. By increasing awareness around the issues at the intersection of child protection, human rights, and sex positivity, we aim to empower those engaged in policy formation to ensure that laws and policies uphold the civil liberties of all while keeping children safe prior to sexual harm.

Specific goals are:
1.Facilitating research into this topic.
2.Diversifying the field of child protection to better represent minority groups.
3.Ensuring that laws and corporate policies dealing with it are evidence-based and comply with human rights standards, so that they are effective and do not cause harm to innocent people.
4.Raising public awareness of child sexual abuse prevention.
5.Helping higher-risk groups of people avoid harming children.

Our primary strategies to address our specific goals are:
1.Helping to fund sound scientific research on CSA prevention.
2.Engaging with diverse stakeholders, whose voices are not normally heard.
3.Addressing the human rights impacts of child protection laws and policies.
4.Communicating the results of research and our engagement to policymakers, platforms, and the public via ad campaigns, blog posts, social media, and an upcoming podcast.
5.Targeted ad campaigns with resources for properly helping higher-risk groups.

Our capabilities are based around the uniquely inclusive and representative stakeholder community that we have built. Unlike similar organizations, we include representatives of communities that are stigmatized and misunderstood, including sex workers, the consensual kink community, the adult entertainment industry, and CSA survivors, alongside experts from the mental health profession, the Internet industry, and the criminal justice reform community. We also have a vibrant and engaged group of volunteers who are able to stretch our limited budget to put our strategies into action. Finally, we have a small but growing membership and social media following.

Prostasia Foundation's flagship achievement during 2021 was the launch of a groundbreaking collaborative research project between the State University of New York Oswego (USA) and Nottingham Trent University (UK) exploring the use of fictional and fantasy sexual outlets among people who have sexual attractions to children.
There has been a widespread assumption among policymakers, and even major child safety groups, that sexualized representations of fictional minors in stories, cartoons, role play, or sex toys enhance the risk of sexual offending by those who use them. As will be discussed below, this assumption has distorted the priorities of lawmakers and law enforcement agencies alike.

Yet like much policy in this area, this assumption is driven by stigma rather than by evidence. No link has been established between the use of sexual outlets and real life sexual offending. Indeed, research could well establish that some people may use such outlets as a coping behavior that helps them to maintain a non-offending lifestyle.
The pilot 1-year study, fully funded by Prostasia Foundation, will explore how fictional and fantasy sexual outlets may be correlated with risk or protective factors for offending behavior by minor-attracted individuals who use them. A progress report on the project was presented at the 2021 conference of the Association for the Treatment of Sexual Abusers (ATSA) in October, and at the May and October workshops of the Assocation for Sexual Abuse Prevention (ASAP).