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Professional dominatrix Madelaine Thomas represents far from your typical tech founder. After multiple occurrences of clients leaking her private explicit images, she was "angry enough to do something about it" and turned to tech solutions for answers.

"These 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 don't know," stated Madelaine.

Little over a year since launching her company, Image Angel, which employs invisible forensic watermarking to track abusers, has won several awards and was recommended as exemplary procedure in an government-commissioned study recently.

This represents a significant shift from her background in providing consensual sexual encounters, dominating clients in the world of BDSM.

The Pervasive Problem

Intimate image abuse, commonly known as image-based abuse, is a punishable crime with perpetrators 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, thirty-seven, explained victims lived with shame and stigma. "I think a lot of people will say, 'you put a saucy picture out on the internet, what do you expect?'," she noted.

"I demand dignity, I expect consideration, and I expect trust, and I don't see 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 my choice, that's not an error on my part, that's an individual being an abuser."

An Unconventional Path

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

"People think it's strange but I view it similarly to a personal trainer or an financial advisor providing a service," she remarked.

She embraces being something of an anomaly in the world of tech. "I know that it's unconventional, it's remarkable to think that an individual who was a dominatrix is now a creator of a tech company, but it took someone who has experienced it firsthand to understand the flaws and the changes that were necessary," she stated.

She maintained she was not in the least bit techy and was managed to build her company after a lot of late nights, research and "bugging people" who know about tech.

Understanding the Tech Solution

Image Angel can be implemented on any digital service where people share images, for instance dating apps, social networks and online sites.

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

This covert marker is embedded into the copy of the image itself and can withstand screenshots, being edited and being re-captured with a secondary device.

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

To date, one platform has implemented her tech and she's in discussions with several more.

An Established Method for a New Purpose

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

"We have validated it, we're collaborating with a company that has decades of expertise in tech development so we are confident that this is solid and what we now need to do is deploy it widely," she added.

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

Removing Stigma, Shifting Blame

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 'what did you expect?' that guilt can really be reinforced so it's really important that the support a victim receives is that they have committed no error," she stated.

She noted it was inspiring that Madelaine was leveraging her ordeal to bring about change, saying: "It is vital to have this comprehensive strategy towards tackling tech facilitated gender-based abuse, because no one tool is going to be able to solve this problem, no one helpline, it needs to be this integrated effort."

TV presenter Jess Davies was only fifteen when photographs of her in her underwear were circulated within her town. It was the beginning of multiple violations Jess endured in her teens and 20s that would later shape her women's rights campaigning.

"It required years, too long for someone to say to me, 'you are not to blame' and 'that was wrong'," recalled Jess.

She too is passionate about removing the stigma of intimate image abuse from the victims to the offenders. "It isn't a crime to willingly share an photo to someone," stated Jess.

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