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Professional dominatrix Madelaine Thomas embodies far from your standard startup entrepreneur. After repeated occurrences of individuals leaking her private explicit images, she felt "sufficiently outraged to do something about it" and turned to technology for answers.

"Those were beautiful pictures, I'm not ashamed of the photographs, I'm ashamed of the manner that they were used against me by an individual who I don't know," explained Madelaine.

Little over a year since founding her company, Image Angel, which employs invisible forensic watermarking to track abusers, has won several awards and was recommended as best practice in an independent pornography review recently.

This represents a significant shift from her previous career in providing consensual sexual encounters, working with clients in the realms of kink and bondage.

A Widespread Issue

Intimate image abuse, commonly known as revenge porn, is a punishable crime with perpetrators facing up to two years in prison.

It is not at all an issue uniquely experienced by those in the sex industry. A study suggests that around 1.42% of the UK female population is impacted by this form of abuse on an annual basis.

Madelaine, thirty-seven, explained survivors 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 anticipate?'," she noted.

"I demand dignity, I expect consideration, and I expect confidence, and I don't see why those are up for debate," she continued. "The fact that those images could be subsequently distributed where I live or with people I love and used to hurt them, that's unacceptable, that's not a decision I made, that's not an error on my part, that's someone committing abuse."

A Unique Journey

Madelaine has been working as a dominatrix, primarily online, for 10 years and always found her work liberating and satisfying. "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 described.

"People think it's strange but I view it similarly to a nutritionist or an accountant giving advice," she added.

She embraces being something of an anomaly in the technology sector. "I know that it's bizarre, it's crazy to think that someone who was a dominatrix is now a founder of a technology firm, but it took someone who has experienced it firsthand to know the loopholes and the changes that needed to happen," she explained.

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

How Does the Technology Work?

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

When an image is accessed by a viewer, it is seamlessly tagged with an undetectable digital marker which is specific to that viewer.

This covert marker 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 discover your image has been circulated non-consensually, providing the service you used has the system integrated, the sharer's information will be encoded in the image and can be extracted by a data recovery specialist so legal steps can follow.

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

Proven Technology, New Application

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

"We have validated it, we're partnering with a company that has decades of expertise 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 hoped the technology would also act as a deterrent to would-be intimate image abusers.

Removing Stigma, Shifting Blame

An advocate from a support service commented she had seen first-hand the panic, distress and self-blame this abuse caused for victims.

"If that self-blame is compounded by a misinformed friend or service who says 'well, why did you take those images in the first place?' that self blame can really be reinforced so it's crucial that the support somebody is provided with is that they have committed no error," she emphasized.

She noted it was inspiring that Madelaine was using her experience to bring about change, adding: "It is vital to have this comprehensive strategy towards tackling technology-enabled 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 just 15 when photographs of her in a state of undress were shared around her local community. It was the first of several incidents Jess endured in her youth that would later inform her advocacy work.

"It required years, an excessive amount of time for someone to tell me, 'you are not to blame' and 'that shouldn't have happened'," recalled Jess.

She too is dedicated to removing the stigma of intimate image abuse from the victims to the perpetrators. "It isn't a crime to willingly share an image to someone," said Jess.

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