And a third woman, named “ED” to protect her anonymity, who survived a brutal attack to give damning testimony: she was a classical pianist, trafficked from eastern Europe, who vowed in court “I will play music again and smile”.
But here are the bald facts: women who sell sex face endemic levels of violence, and are often reluctant to report to the police because they don’t trust them to take their complaints seriously.
National Ugly Mugs (NUM), a UK-wide charity working with sex workers, allows women to report violence, including anonymously, and sign up for alerts about clients to avoid. The charity says that last year, they processed 1,047 reports of varying severities of violence, but only 8% of those women consented to sharing these incidents with the police.
A year before that, in 2024, a snapshot survey of women involved in prostitution across Scotland found that 90% had experienced violence, including attempted murder, while a quarter had been sexually abused as children and a sixth sexually exploited before the age of 18.
That study was published around the time that Iain Packer, another serial violent offender, was jailed for 36 years for the 2005 murder of Emma Caldwell and a catalogue of sexual violence against 22 other vulnerable women working in Glasgow. The case exposed chronic police failings, finding a dismissive attitude among the police towards women selling sex, and that they had normalised the violence sex workers encountered at the hands of the men paying them.
Twenty years later, policing strategy has moved on significantly – overall guidance now follows a harm reduction model, and aims to prioritise the safety of women involved. But the daily reality is that many women say this hasn’t filtered down to frontline policing and, while the focus is supposed to be on men buying sex, it’s women who are given cautions, fines, or arrested.
What happened to the women who worked alongside Simon Levy’s victims?
Sheryl Wilkins was murdered by Simon Levy in a Tottenham car park in August 2025, where he violently raped “ED” earlier that year.
But women working alongside Wilkins had been complaining about police treatment for a year before her death, as local officers implemented ‘Clear, Hold, Build’: a national framework introduced in 2023 to tackle organised crime, which has since been used for lower-level antisocial behaviour, including begging, drug dealing and street-based sex work.
‘Closure zones’ were introduced to clear specific areas – including the same Tottenham car park – with women arrested and fined for breaching them. Police argue that the strategy was designed with safety in mind, including sign-posting women to better-lit areas.
Niki Adams, of the English Collective of Prostitutes (ECP), says that women were pushed into more isolated, unlit areas. “Women try to work in pairs, so they can indicate to somebody else when they’re getting into a man’s car.” The new strategy, Adams says, broke up that arrangement.
This included Sheryl Wilkins, who had been displaced from her regular spot on Fore Street. “The other women that were working with her felt outraged and upset when she was killed, because they felt that it was a direct result of this policing”.
More broadly, if women feel they are on the run from the police, it affects their ability to take regular clients. By law, while exchanging sexual services for money is legal, soliciting such work is illegal.
“When you’re in that situation, with pressure to earn a certain amount of money for whatever reason, you’re more likely to go with people that you otherwise would have been wary of,” says Adams.
Crucially, this deprives the police of vital intelligence. “If you have a better relationship with the police, those smaller incidents get reported and a picture starts to build up if there’s a particular predator in the area,” says Adams.
Since the murders of Valencia-Trujillo and Wilkins, the Met has sent specialist officers to the area with the express purpose of repairing mistrust, working alongside local charities to offer support with personal safety, housing and healthcare.
Who is involved?
Support agencies have been saying for some years that the group of women who sell sex is becoming increasingly diverse, as family budgets tighten during the cost of living crisis. While data is difficult to collect, estimates suggest a significant majority are mothers supporting dependent children.
ECP and NUM report growing numbers of women seeking out their support services and, in a new development, some returning to prostitution having left it previously.
Online adverts have changed how clients are sourced, with support groups saying the biggest threat to safety remains the fact that women risk arrest by working together indoors, pushing more of their work on to the streets.
What would actually make women safer?
Groups like ECP and NUM argue that decriminalising prostitution is the best way to protect women; others maintain that the focus must be on criminalising men who buy sex. It’s a debate that has polarised those who might otherwise be sisters in arms in the fight against violence against women and girls for decades.
Belinda Brooks-Gordon, professor of forensic psychology at Birkbeck, has researched this territory and assessed the tides of policymaking for decades. She recalls writing to the national media with other academics in early 2006, in protest at the then Labour government’s plans to shelve managed tolerance zones in favour of a hardline approach to prostitution. “We were saying ‘this is really dangerous for women on the street’. They piloted a clampdown strategy in six cities, one of which was Ipswich. And tragically, in the autumn of that year, five women were murdered there.”
Brooks-Gordon is an adviser to the National Police Chiefs’ Council’s lead on sex work and trafficking, and bears witness to a hollowing out of funding, which has affected creative pilots and even surveillance of those on the sex offender register – which Levy was on – over the decades.
“You’ve got a lot of energetic, well-meaning, and highly trained people wanting to do the best they can, and the resources they’re given are thinner and thinner,” she says.
She recalls the Holbeck experiment set up in Leeds in 2014 and discontinued in 2021, which allowed street sex workers to operate freely in the area without fear of arrest between the hours of 8pm and 6am, but became the focus of ongoing protests by local residents for antisocial behaviour. “You have to address residents’ complaints, but where these managed zones operate they save lives – we know that from the Netherlands,” says Brooks-Gordon.
The Merseyside model, which has now been running for 20 years, treats violence against women selling sex as a hate crime and boasted a 67% success rate for rape convictions against sex workers after its first decade. But that work has not been adopted at national level.
NUM is involved with an education programme for police forces about the benefits of community liaison roles. “A lot of really good work is being done on liaison,’ says chief executive Lynsey Walton, “but even if you have the best practice in place, it’s only in recent years that sex workers have been spoken to at all, so it’s very hard to retrospectively build that trust.”
But doing so, as the Levy case brings home yet again, can be a matter for life and death. “How can our criminal justice system effectively identify and stop serial perpetrators if the people they target don’t feel sufficiently safe to engage with it?” says Walton. “Prevention requires us to take seriously the people who are telling us where the danger is.”
Tuesday briefing: What the Simon Levy case tells us about the women the justice system keeps failing | Crime | The Guardian
