One of the world's leading anti-pornography campaigners predicts that Britain will be next in following Iceland's lead and looking at a ban on internet pornography.

Iceland's ministry of the interior is drawing up anti-porn legislation after consultations with police and education and health officials showed strong concern over the impact of online porn on children as well as women and their relationships with men.

Dr Gail Dines, a British-American academic based at Wheelock College in Boston, Massachusetts and author of Pornland: How Porn has Hijacked our Sexuality, said she believed that Britain would be next to attempt to filter out the "increasingly brutal and hardcore imagery which is now the standard".

"I have been talking to charities in the UK and the NSPCC and professionals and they are seeing what is happening, the rise in child abuse, the violence. There are real moves afoot to follow Iceland. We live in a very closed-down society when it comes to talking about sex so a lot of people have their heads in the sand but not those working on the ground. You cannot leave it to parents. Online porn is shaping the sexual lives of our young people."

Claire Lilley, of the NSPCC, said: "We wouldn't come out and ask for a full ban, we want to stop children being exposed to it. The average child now has access to five devices so we are beyond the stage of a parental lock on the family PC. But there is wrangling and foot-dragging from the internet service providers over how we can implement the opt-out system, where new customers to an ISP are asked specifically to say they want access to adult sites otherwise they will be blocked. She said the gambling industry had managed to run an age verification system successfully.

"We are not being moralistic about pornography. The stuff children are coming across is hardcore and upsetting. It's also staggering how widespread child pornography is."