David Cameron outlines plans for every UK internet user to be asked whether they want access to pornography in a major crackdown on hardcore images online.
Family-friendly filters which block porn will be automatically selected for all new internet customers, though people will be able to choose whether to switch them off.
Internet providers will also contact millions of existing customers and ask them to decide whether to activate filters to stop children accessing unsuitable material.
I want to talk about the internet, the impact it is having on the innocence of our children. David Cameron
Mr Cameron said in a speech: “This has never been a debate about companies or government censoring the internet but about filters to protect children at the home network level.
“We need good filters that are pre-selected to be on unless an adult turns them off and we need parents aware and engaged in the setting of those filters.”
By the end of next year, service providers will have contacted all of their existing customers and presented them with an unavoidable decision about whether or not to install family friendly content filters.
Experts from the Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre (Ceop), which is set to become part of the National Crime Agency, will then be given enhanced powers to examine secretive file-sharing networks.
And a secure database of banned child porn images gathered by police across the country will be used to trace illegal content and the paedophiles viewing it.
Mr Cameron added: “Once CEOP becomes a part of the National Crime Agency, that will further increase their ability to investigate behind pay walls, to shine a light on the hidden internet and to drive prosecutions of those who are found to use it.
“So let me be clear to any offender who might think otherwise, there is no such thing as a ‘safe’ place on the internet to access child abuse material.
“We will give CEOP and the police all the powers they need to keep pace with the changing nature of the internet.”
Mr Cameron said that porn was “hard for our society to confront and difficult for politicians to talk about” but added that “we need to address as a matter of urgency”.
He said: “I want to talk about the internet, the impact it is having on the innocence of our children [and] how online pornography is corroding childhood.”
Possessing violent pornography containing simulated rape scenes will also be made a crime in England and Wales, the prime minister said.
Mr Cameron also set out plans for new laws so that videos streamed online in the UK are subject to the same restrictions as those sold in shops.
Join the campaign to protect our children online, and read the speech Iâ??m about to deliver, at http://t.co/R83i5DOdPf #ProtectingChildren
— David Cameron (@David_Cameron) July 22, 2013
The announcement was welcomed by women’s groups and academics who had campaigned to close the “rape porn” loophole.
Fiona Elvines, of Rape Crisis South London, said: “The government today has made a significant step forward in preventing rapists using rape pornography to legitimise and strategise their crimes and, more broadly, in challenging the eroticisation of violence against women and girls.”