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BDSM practitioner Madelaine Thomas represents far from your typical tech founder. After multiple occurrences of clients leaking her intimate photographs, she was "sufficiently outraged to do something about it" and turned to technology for a solution.

"Those were striking images, I'm not ashamed of the pictures, I'm embarrassed of the manner that they were weaponized by someone who I have never met," stated Madelaine.

Little over a year since founding her venture, Image Angel, which uses covert digital tracking to track abusers, has garnered significant recognition and was cited as best practice in an government-commissioned study recently.

This marks a significant shift from her previous career in providing consensual sexual encounters, working with clients in the realms of BDSM.

The Pervasive Problem

Intimate image abuse, commonly known as revenge porn, is a criminal offence with offenders facing up to 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 UK female population is impacted by intimate image abuse each year.

Madelaine, 37, said survivors lived with feelings of humiliation. "I think a lot of people will say, 'you shared a saucy picture out on the internet, what do you expect?'," she said.

"I demand dignity, I expect consideration, and I expect trust, 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 employed to cause them pain, that's unacceptable, that's not a decision I made, that's not an error on my part, that's someone being an abuser."

An Unconventional Path

Madelaine has been working as a professional dominatrix, mainly online, for a decade and always found her work empowering and fulfilling. "I am as a woman in control, a woman who is empowered and strong, offering my body as a gift to someone because I wish to," she described.

"People think it's strange but I don't see it any differently to a nutritionist or an accountant giving advice," she remarked.

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 took someone who has experienced it firsthand to know the flaws and the changes that needed to happen," she explained.

She insisted she was not in the least bit techy and was able to build her company after a lot of sleepless nights, investigation and "consulting experts" who know about tech.

Understanding the Tech Solution

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

When an image is viewed by a viewer, it is seamlessly tagged with an invisible forensic watermark which is specific to that viewer.

This covert marker is embedded into the copy of the image itself and can withstand screen shots, being altered and being photographed with a secondary device.

It ensures that if you find out your image has been circulated non-consensually, providing the platform you used has the technology embedded, the viewer's details will be encoded in the image and can be retrieved by a forensic expert so legal steps can follow.

Currently, one platform has adopted her tech and she's in talks with many others.

An Established Method for a New Purpose

"This technology already exists in Hollywood, it is employed in live television so this is not an untested concept, it's just a new application and a different framework," explained Madelaine.

"And we've tested it, we're partnering with a company that has 30 years experience in tech development so we are confident that this is reliable and what we now need to do is deploy it widely," she continued.

She said she believed the technology would also act as a preventive measure to potential perpetrators.

Changing the Narrative

An advocate from a leading helpline said she had seen directly the trauma and guilt intimate image abuse inflicted on victims.

"If that self-blame is reinforced by a misinformed friend or service who says 'well, why did you take those images in the first place?' that guilt can really be reinforced so it's crucial that the response somebody is provided with is that they have not done anything wrong," she emphasized.

She added it was fantastic that Madelaine was using her experience to bring about change, saying: "It is vital to have this multi-layered approach towards addressing tech facilitated gender-based abuse, because a single solution is going to be able to solve this problem, not just support services, it needs to be this multi-layered response."

TV presenter Jess Davies was only fifteen when photographs of her in a state of undress were circulated within her local community. It was the first of several incidents Jess experienced in her youth 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 dedicated to eliminating the shame of intimate image abuse from the victims to the perpetrators. "There is no offence to consensually send an image to someone," stated Jess.

"However, it is illegal to distribute that without consent and I think that should invariably be where the blame is," she affirmed.