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BDSM practitioner Madelaine Thomas represents far from your average tech founder. After repeated occurrences of clients leaking her intimate photographs, she felt "sufficiently outraged to take action" and turned to technology for a solution.

"These were striking images, I'm unapologetic of the pictures, I'm embarrassed of the manner that they were used against me by someone who I have never met," stated Madelaine.

Little over a year after founding her company, Image Angel, which uses invisible forensic watermarking to identify abusers, has garnered significant recognition and was recommended as best practice in an government-commissioned study earlier this year.

This marks a significant shift from her background in offering BDSM services, working with clients in the world of BDSM.

The Pervasive Problem

Intimate image abuse, commonly known as revenge porn, is a punishable crime with offenders risking two years in prison.

It is far from an issue uniquely experienced by those in the sex industry. A study suggests that approximately 1.42% of the women in the UK is impacted by intimate image abuse each year.

Madelaine, 37, said survivors lived with shame and stigma. "In my view a lot of people will say, 'you shared a saucy picture out on the internet, what do you expect?'," she noted.

"I expect dignity, I expect consideration, and I expect confidence, and I fail to understand why those are negotiable," she added. "The reality that those images could be subsequently distributed in my community or with my loved ones and used to hurt them, that's beyond, that's not my choice, that's not an error on my part, that's someone committing abuse."

A Unique Journey

Madelaine has been working as a professional dominatrix, primarily online, for 10 years and consistently found her work empowering and fulfilling. "It's me as a dominant woman, a woman who is empowered and strong, offering my body as a gift to someone because I wish to," she said.

"People think it's strange but I don't see it any differently to a personal trainer or an financial advisor providing a service," she added.

She embraces being something of an anomaly in the technology sector. "I know that it's unconventional, it's crazy to think that someone who was a dominatrix is now a creator of a technology firm, but it required someone who has been through it to understand the flaws and the modifications that needed to happen," she stated.

She insisted she was not technically inclined and was managed to build her company after a lot of late nights, investigation and "bugging people" who know about tech.

How Does the Technology Work?

Image Angel can be implemented on any online platform where people share images, for instance social connection apps, social networks and websites.

When an image is viewed by a user, it is seamlessly tagged with an undetectable digital marker which is unique to them.

This covert marker is embedded into the digital file of the image itself and can withstand screenshots, being edited and being photographed with a secondary device.

It ensures that if you find out your image has been circulated non-consensually, providing the service you posted it on has the system integrated, the viewer's details will be hidden within the image and can be extracted by a forensic expert so legal steps can follow.

Currently, one service has adopted her tech and she's in discussions with several more.

An Established Method for a New Purpose

"The system already exists in Hollywood, it already exists in sports broadcasting so this is not brand new technology, it's just a novel use and a different framework," said Madelaine.

"We have validated it, we're partnering with a company that has decades of expertise in tech development so we know that this is reliable and what we now need to do is deploy it widely," she continued.

She said she hoped the technology would also act as a deterrent to potential intimate image abusers.

Changing the Narrative

An advocate from a support service said she had seen directly the trauma and guilt this abuse inflicted on victims.

"If that self-blame is compounded by a misinformed friend or professional who says 'what did you expect?' that self blame can really be deepened so it's really important that the support a victim receives is that they have not done anything wrong," she stated.

She added it was inspiring that Madelaine was leveraging her ordeal to create solutions, adding: "It is really important to have this multi-layered approach towards addressing technology-enabled gender-based abuse, because a single solution is going to be able to tackle this alone, not just support services, it needs to be this integrated effort."

TV presenter Jess Davies was just 15 when photographs of her in her underwear were circulated within her local community. It was the first of several incidents Jess endured in her teens and 20s that would later inform her women's rights campaigning.

"It took so long, too long for someone to say to me, 'you are not to blame' and 'that was wrong'," said Jess.

She too is passionate about eliminating the shame of this crime from the victims to the perpetrators. "It isn't a crime to consensually send an image to someone," stated Jess.

"But it is a crime to distribute that non-consensually and I think that should invariably be where the responsibility is," she affirmed.