Justice system's blind spot: Why sex workers remain targets for predators

Simon Levy walked into a Tottenham car park in August 2025 and murdered Sheryl Wilkins. He had already raped another woman there months earlier—a classical pianist trafficked from eastern Europe, known in court documents only as ED, who survived to testify that she would play music again and smile. Levy was a registered sex offender with a history of sexual violence stretching back to 2018. He chose his victims with deliberate calculation: women who sold sex, women he believed the system had already written off. In the end, he killed two—Carmenza Valencia-Trujillo and Sheryl Wilkins—before a rare whole life sentence stopped him. But the question that haunted the case was simpler and more damning: Why had Levy ever believed he could get away with it?

The answer lies not in any single failure but in a system-wide blindness. Women who sell sex face what researchers call endemic levels of violence. A snapshot survey across Scotland found that 90 percent had experienced violence, including attempted murder. A quarter had been sexually abused as children. Yet when National Ugly Mugs, a UK charity that documents violence against sex workers, processed 1,047 reports of varying severity last year, only 8 percent of those women consented to share the incidents with police. The gap between what happens and what gets reported is not a small oversight—it is a chasm that predators exploit.

The distrust is not paranoia. Women working the streets alongside Wilkins had spent a year complaining about police treatment before her death. The problem was a national framework called Clear, Hold, Build, introduced in 2023 to tackle organized crime but deployed against street-based sex work as a lower-level antisocial behaviour. Police created closure zones and arrested women for breaching them, supposedly to push them toward better-lit areas. What actually happened was different. Niki Adams of the English Collective of Prostitutes explained the mechanics: women try to work in pairs so they can signal when getting into a car with a client. The new policing strategy broke up those arrangements. Sheryl Wilkins was displaced from her regular spot on Fore Street. When she was killed in an isolated location, the women who had worked alongside her felt the connection immediately—they believed her death was a direct result of being pushed into danger by the very officers meant to protect her.

The pressure compounds. By law, selling sex is legal; soliciting it is not. When women feel hunted by police, they cannot work with regular clients they know and trust. They take risks they would otherwise avoid. They become more vulnerable. And crucially, they stop talking to police about the smaller incidents—the warning signs, the patterns, the predators circling. Intelligence dries up. The system loses its early warning system. Predators like Levy calculate that they can operate in the shadows.

The history here is long and instructive. In 2006, academics including forensic psychologist Belinda Brooks-Gordon wrote to the national media protesting the Labour government's plan to abandon managed tolerance zones in favour of a hardline approach. They warned it would be dangerous for women on the street. The government piloted a clampdown in six cities. One was Ipswich. That autumn, five women were murdered there. The pattern repeated: policy made without listening to the people most affected, implemented without resources, enforced without nuance, with bodies as the consequence.

Some models have worked. Merseyside has treated violence against sex workers as a hate crime for twenty years and achieved a 67 percent rape conviction rate in its first decade. Leeds ran the Holbeck experiment from 2014 to 2021, allowing street sex workers to operate freely between 8am and 6pm without fear of arrest—a managed zone that saved lives, as similar zones do in the Netherlands. But these remain exceptions. Funding has hollowed out. Surveillance of sex offenders on the register—like Levy—has been starved of resources. The people trying to do the work are energetic and well-trained, but the resources grow thinner.

Since the murders, the Met has sent specialist officers to repair the damage, working with local charities on safety and support. National Ugly Mugs is running education programmes for police forces about community liaison. But as the charity's chief executive Lynsey Walton noted, sex workers have only recently been spoken to at all. Building trust retrospectively, after decades of dismissal and harm, is possible—but it is also fragile and slow. The question that matters now is whether the system will listen to the women telling it where the danger is before the next predator calculates that he can get away with it.