In 2002 and 2003 the Japanese press ran a near-daily stream of stories about child prostitution, sexual assault, and suicide arranged through deai-kei (encounter) sites. Reachable in a few taps from a mobile phone’s i-mode browser, these sites were a distinctly Japanese media ecosystem of the early 2000s, and the harm that travelled with them grew as fast as the user base. By the National Police Agency’s count, arrests for child-prostitution offences arranged through such sites had climbed into the hundreds per year. The political pressure to legislate built quickly, and in June 2003 a Diet-member bill became law.

The Dating-Site Regulation Act (出会い系サイト規制法) is the common name for the Act on Regulation of Acts of Soliciting Children by Using Internet Dating Services (Act No. 83 of 2003), passed in June 2003 and in force from 13 September 2003. To prevent child prostitution and sex offences arranged through dating sites, the Act criminalises the soliciting of minors, and imposes registration and age-verification duties on operators. This article covers the legislative background, the principal provisions, the 2008 amendment, and the subsequent enforcement record.

Legislative background

The 1999 child-prostitution and child-pornography statute had established a framework directly punishing the purchase of sex from, and the production of pornography of, persons under 18. But the act of solicitation through a dating site sat outside that statute’s reach: the back-and-forth of offering and answering paid-sex propositions through the site itself fell into a grey zone of the existing elements.

Faced with the early-2000s surge in dating-site crime, the National Police Agency and Ministry of Justice worked toward a comprehensive scheme combining operator regulation and user regulation. A cross-party member bill was introduced in May 2003, passed in June, and took effect on 13 September.

Principal provisions

The core offence (Article 6) prohibits using a dating site to solicit a child for paid sexual conduct, to offer oneself as the counterparty to such conduct with a child, or to arrange a paid meeting with a child. Violation carries a fine of up to one million yen. The structure targets users (overwhelmingly adult men) while expressly excluding the child from punishment.

The Act also required operators of internet introduction services to register with the prefectural public safety commission (Article 7), to verify that users are not under 18 (Article 11), to take prompt removal measures against soliciting posts (Article 12), and to display a clear notice that minors may not use the service (Article 10). The age-verification duty originally allowed self-declaration, which proved largely ineffective.

The 2008 amendment

The 2003 law had three recurring weaknesses: operators were hard to locate and police, overseas-hosted sites lay beyond effective enforcement, and age verification by self-declaration was a formality. An amendment promulgated in June 2008 and in force from 1 December 2008 introduced a registration duty for operators, tightened age verification (driver’s licence or other identity document, or credit-card payment, became the rule from February 2009; bare self-declaration was no longer sufficient), added business-improvement and suspension powers, and set penalties for unregistered operation (up to six months’ imprisonment or a one-million-yen fine).

Enforcement and the platform shift

In 2004, the year after the Act took effect, dating-site-linked cases (child prostitution, child pornography, and prostitution-law violations) numbered roughly 1,800, with around 720 child victims. After the 2008 amendment the figures fell steadily, into the low hundreds by the late 2010s.

The decline did not mean child victimisation fell overall. Harm migrated outside the Act’s defined category of “dating site”: to social media, community sites, chat services, and matchmaking apps. From the 2010s, cases routed through Twitter (now X), Instagram, LINE, TikTok, and dating apps rose, and the National Police Agency’s “community-site victim” tally came to exceed the dating-site figure. The Act regulates a category of service that the harm has largely moved beyond.

Relation to neighbouring law

The child-prostitution statute punishes the purchase of sex from and pornography production of children directly; this Act punishes the upstream solicitation stage. Together with the child-pornography law, prefectural youth-protection ordinances, and nuisance-prevention ordinances, the three statutes build a layered framework of child protection, with zoning-type controls operating alongside.

See also

• Child-prostitution statute
• Child-pornography law
• Age of consent
• Revenge porn
• Sexual harassment