Tuesday briefing: What the Simon Levy case tells us about the women the justice system keeps failing

The System That Lets Predators Choose Their Targets

Wanderstayfinder.com – A whole life tariff — one of the rarest sentences available in English courts — landed on Simon Levy last week for the murders of Carmenza Valencia-Trujillo and Sheryl Wilkins. Both women were engaged in sex work, and both were vulnerable. That detail was not incidental. In his sentencing remarks, the judge made explicit what Levy had calculated: a man with a record of sexual offending stretching back to 2018 had deliberately chosen women who sold sex because he was confident no one would hold him accountable. He was wrong, ultimately. But the question that deserves far more attention than it received is not how the police failed to catch him. It is why he believed, with such certainty, that women in prostitution could be harmed without consequence.

That assumption did not emerge from nowhere. It was built, brick by brick, over decades of institutional indifference toward the violence these women endure. The coverage of the Levy case rightly scrutinised prosecutorial and policing failures that allowed him to kill twice. Yet beneath those procedural lapses sits a deeper structural problem: the justice system has long treated the experiences of sex workers as secondary, as something to be managed rather than protected.

A Shift in Language, and What It Signals

One telling detail from the reporting on this case: for the first time in a matter of this kind, the majority of coverage referred to the victims as “women” before “sex workers.” The stories centred on their fullness of life rather than their occupation. Carmenza’s joy at becoming a grandmother. Sheryl, a mother of four carrying, in the words of those who knew her, “so many hopes and dreams.” And a third woman, identified only as “ED” to safeguard her anonymity, who survived a savage assault and took the stand to deliver testimony that shook the courtroom. She was a classical pianist, trafficked from eastern Europe, and she made a promise before the judge:

“I will play music again and smile.”

That shift in framing matters. It signals that the public is beginning to see these women as whole people rather than as a category of risk. But language alone does not close the gap between perception and protection.

The Numbers Behind the Silence

The statistics are stark and consistent. National Ugly Mugs, a UK-wide charity that supports sex workers, processed 1,047 reports of violence of varying severity in the most recent year. Of those women, only eight per cent agreed to have their incidents passed on to the police. The distrust is not irrational. It is earned.

A 2024 snapshot survey of women involved in prostitution across Scotland found that ninety per cent had experienced violence, including attempted murder. A quarter had been sexually abused as children. A sixth had been sexually exploited before turning eighteen. These are not outliers; they are the baseline condition of a profession that the state has historically treated as a nuisance to be regulated rather than a workforce to be safeguarded.

Twenty Years After Glasgow

The publication of that Scottish survey coincided with the sentencing of Iain Packer, another serial offender, who received thirty-six years for the 2005 murder of Emma Caldwell and a catalogue of sexual violence against twenty-two other vulnerable women working in Glasgow. The trial laid bare a dismissive culture within local policing: officers had normalised the brutality sex workers faced at the hands of their clients, treating it as an occupational hazard rather than a crime demanding investigation.

Two decades on, the formal architecture of policing strategy has changed. Current guidance follows a harm-reduction model and nominally prioritises the safety of women involved in sex work. Yet the daily reality, as many women report, is that this philosophy has not reached the front line. While policy directs attention toward the men buying sex, it is still the women who receive cautions, fines, and arrests. The gap between strategy and street-level practice remains wide.

What Happened to the Women Working Beside

Sheryl Wilkins was killed by Simon Levy in a Tottenham car park in August 2025. Earlier that same year, in the same location, he had violently raped “ED.” Women working alongside Wilkins had been lodging complaints about police treatment for a full year before her murder. Their voices went unheard, their warnings unheeded, until the violence became so extreme that it could no longer be ignored.

The pattern is not unique to London. It repeats in every city where sex work persists in a legal grey zone and where the women doing it have been taught, through years of being dismissed, that the system will not come for them.

Other Headlines

On the political front, Reform UK’s deputy leader Richard Tice dismissed efforts to address climate breakdown, telling British people to simply “enjoy” the summer heatwaves. In Washington, Donald Trump issued a threat to bomb Oman should the country “get in the way” of ending the US-Israel war on Iran. In the Democratic Republic of Congo, the Ebola outbreak has become the deadliest in the nation’s history, with official data confirming at least 2,325 deaths. In London, tens of thousands gathered in Trafalgar Square to honour Jason Arday, the former Cambridge professor who died on Friday. And in the housing market, half of all homes in Great Britain are now taking longer to sell than a year ago, as buyers pause amid mortgage volatility linked to the Iran conflict, waiting to see whether prices will dip further.

Each of those stories carries its own weight. But the thread running through the Levy case — and through the decades of data, surveys, and unheeded complaints that surround it — is a question the justice system has yet to answer honestly: what do we owe the women we have spent so long treating as expendable?