LMH in the Field: Georgia Moore on understanding CSAM offending

LMH postgraduate researcher Georgia Moore (2025, MPhil Law) has spent the past year examining people who search for child sexual abuse material (CSAM) on the dark web, challenging assumptions about who they are and what might prevent further abuse. 

For Georgia, the path into CSAM research started with a desire to understand how she could support children facing difficult circumstances. 

“I began volunteering during my early teenage years in any capacity I could,” Georgia says, “to try and support my community.” 

Growing up in Toronto, she volunteered with youth shelters, legal aid organisations and inpatient mental health facilities. At McGill University, where she studied Psychology, this interest developed into research. She joined a lab focused on child maltreatment and contributed to projects on child abuse during COVID-19, child sex trafficking in Canada and best practices when interviewing children who had disclosed maltreatment. 

“Young people deserve the opportunity to grow up in peace, and to navigate from childhood into adulthood uninterrupted,” she says. “This isn't the case for so many children around the world.” 

After graduating from McGill, Georgia began working in the criminal courts in Canada. There, she encountered a number of cases involving technologically facilitated child sexual abuse, an experience that reinforced her decision to continue her studies. 

She came to Oxford in 2024 to study for an MSc in Criminology and Criminal Justice, where her dissertation focused on peer-to-peer sextortion. She became particularly interested in what she describes as a “wicked problem," a complex social problem with no single or straightforward solution.

“What do we do when children are both the victim and the perpetrator of technologically facilitated abuse?” she asks. “What does this mean for prevention efforts? Does this change how we conceptualise perpetration?” 

For her MPhil, Georgia has taken that interest further, examining people who search for CSAM on the dark web. 

Drawing on survey responses from more than 26,000 people who had searched for CSAM on the dark web, collected by Protect Children, a child protection NGO based in Helsinki, Finland. Georgia’s MPhil research examines two subgroups within this population: those defined as ‘contact-driven’ and ‘fantasy-driven’. 

Contact-driven individuals are those whose engagement with CSAM forms part of a wider pattern of direct child victimisation. This may involve an offline contact offence or direct engagement with children online. Fantasy-driven individuals, by contrast, engage with CSAM online without otherwise directly engaging with children. 

Georgia’s study is one of the first to apply this distinction of groups to a sample of dark-web CSAM users. She describes the work as a preliminary exploratory study, intended to explore differences between groups within a much larger and more complex population. 

One of the findings that challenged Georgia’s expectations was the age profile of respondents. In the data she examined, many respondents were young men, with a substantial proportion aged between 18 and 24. 

The research also found that most respondents did not report a previous sexual or violent criminal charge, either involving adults or children. 

“Not only did many CSAM offenders not report a sexual interest in children, but they were also typically very young men,” Georgia says. Respondents identified a range of motivations, including curiosity and their own experiences of childhood abuse, as well as desensitisation to adult sexual content. 

These findings challenge the idea that CSAM offenders form a single, easily defined group. 

“We might assume that these individuals are akin to the stereotypical ‘paedophile’ that is portrayed in popular media,” Georgia says. “However, through using survey data from over 26,000 respondents searching for CSAM on the dark web, my research demonstrates that this is often not the case. 

“We must recognise that CSAM offenders are not a homogenous group,” she says. “Not only do they behave differently, but their propensity to engage with children directly.” 

The work has also brought Georgia into contact with a difficult area of research. She describes the past year as emotionally challenging, particularly because of the nature of the material involved. As part of her research, Georgia has had direct interaction with CSAM offenders. 

“Over the past 12 months I have read things that will stay with me forever. 

“We need to know more about these people to prevent this ubiquitous form of abuse and researching them is part of how we can best do that,” she says. 

Looking ahead, Georgia hopes to continue working in child protection, either professionally or through a future PhD. Her MPhil research is a first step in what she sees as a much larger body of work. 

“There is an urgent need to focus on CSAM offenders,” she says, because understanding their behaviour can help inform efforts to prevent further abuse. 

“I am constantly reminded of how important this research is. The thought of contributing to the knowledge base on this subject makes the difficulty of engaging with this topic worthwhile a hundred times over.”

Georgia will join Protect Children as an intern in September, continuing her work in child protection and research into technologically facilitated child sexual abuse.