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BDSM practitioner Madelaine Thomas is not at all your standard startup entrepreneur. After multiple instances of individuals leaking her private explicit images, she felt "angry enough to take action" and turned to tech solutions for a solution.

"Those were beautiful pictures, I'm not ashamed of the pictures, I'm embarrassed of the manner that they were weaponized by an individual who I have never met," said Madelaine.

Just over a year after launching her company, Image Angel, which employs invisible forensic watermarking to track perpetrators, has garnered significant recognition and was cited as best practice in an independent pornography review earlier this year.

This marks quite a departure from her background in offering consensual sexual encounters, working with clients in the realms of kink and bondage.

A Widespread Issue

Intimate image abuse, often referred to 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 adult entertainment sector. A report indicates that approximately 1.42% of the women in the UK is impacted by intimate image abuse on an annual basis.

Madelaine, 37, said victims endured feelings of humiliation. "I think a lot of people will comment, 'you shared a saucy picture out on the internet, what do you expect?'," she noted.

"I demand dignity, I expect respect, and I expect confidence, and I fail to understand why those are up for debate," she continued. "The fact that those images could be subsequently distributed in my community or with people I love and used to hurt them, that's beyond, that's not a decision I made, that's not my mistake, that's someone being an abuser."

An Unconventional Path

Madelaine has been working as a dominatrix, mainly online, for a decade and always found her work empowering and fulfilling. "I am as a dominant woman, a woman who is confident and powerful, giving my body as a gift to someone because I wish to," she described.

"People think it's unusual but I don't see it any differently to a nutritionist or an accountant providing a service," she added.

She embraces being a unique figure in the technology sector. "I know that it's unconventional, it's remarkable to think that someone who was a dominatrix is now a creator of a tech company, but it took someone who has experienced it firsthand to know the flaws and the changes that needed to happen," she stated.

She maintained she was not in the least bit techy and was able to build her company after many sleepless nights, research and "bugging people" who know about tech.

Understanding the Tech Solution

Image Angel can be implemented on any online platform where people exchange photos, for instance social connection apps, social media and online sites.

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

This invisible watermark is embedded into the digital file of the image itself and can survive 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, as long as the service you used has the technology embedded, the sharer's information will be encoded in the image and can be extracted by a forensic expert so legal steps can follow.

To date, one service has implemented her tech and she's in discussions with many others.

Proven Technology, New Application

"This technology already exists in the film industry, it is employed in live television so this is not an untested concept, it's just a novel use and a different framework," said Madelaine.

"We have validated it, we're partnering with a firm that has decades of expertise in developing technology so we are confident that this is reliable and what we now need to do is test it at scale," she continued.

She expressed hope she believed the technology would also act as a deterrent to would-be intimate image abusers.

Changing the Narrative

An advocate from a leading helpline commented 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 'what did you expect?' that self blame can really be reinforced so it's crucial that the response a victim receives is that they have committed no error," she stated.

She added it was inspiring that Madelaine was leveraging her ordeal to create solutions, adding: "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 tackle this alone, 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 shared around her local community. It was the beginning of multiple violations Jess endured in her teens and 20s that would later shape her advocacy work.

"It took so long, too long for someone to say to me, 'it wasn't your fault' and 'that shouldn't have happened'," said Jess.

She too is passionate about removing the stigma of this crime from the survivors to the offenders. "It isn't a crime to consensually send an photo to someone," said Jess.

"However, it is illegal to distribute that non-consensually and I think that should always be where the blame is," she concluded.