Met needs to move away from criminalising sex workers, officers say after Levy failings

ByDaniel De SimoneInvestigations correspondent and Amy JohnstonReporting fromLondon

The Met need to move away from criminalising women involved in street sex work in the wake of the Simon Levy case, officers have told the BBC.

Levy, a convicted sex offender, was left to kill two women and rape another - all of whom were vulnerable and sometimes engaged in street sex work - due to a series of failings, including by the force.

Now the Met is piloting a new two-officer female team in north London to engage with street sex workers, in a bid to improve trust and encourage them to report crimes committed against them.

The Levy case exposed grave failings in policing and also the inherent tension in its approach to street sex workers.

Sex work is legal in the UK, excluding Northern Ireland, but related activities like soliciting for clients in public places - known as street sex work - working together, or brothel keeping, pimping and advertising sexual services are all illegal.

Street sex workers are also often targeted by police using anti-social behaviour powers.

Many women who require protection naturally fear arrest and do not trust officers to investigate violence.

On patrol with officers who run new Met scheme

The BBC joined a patrol with the two plain-clothed female officers who run the new Met scheme, Operation Amicus.

They described hearing about endemic levels of male violence against the women they have met, who come from a cohort of 80 women in the area identified as involved in street-based sex work.

"Every single one has reported something," one of the officers said, "whether they've been raped, they've been punched - they've been attacked in some way, shape or form."

The officers, whom the BBC agreed not to name, said several women have been too scared to report abuse to the police.

The officers described encountering an appalling situation in which women are repeatedly attacked by men but think the police cannot be trusted to help.

Some women "expect to be raped and sexually assaulted by customers - it's just become the norm, so [they think] what is the point in reporting [it]", one of the officers said.

The new team added that they were trying to help the women to formally report crimes.

'They're just trying to survive'

"Once they report one and they realise they're being listened to, they then start to report the next one because they know that somebody's [going] to turn up and somebody's going to listen and [they're] going to be taken seriously."

The officers the BBC spoke to said the Met needs to move away from criminalising women involved in street sex work – saying it's "not fair" when "they're just trying to survive".

They said they were also aware of concerns by residents about sex work in their streets and the need to tackle organised crime.

Levy, who was given a whole-life term in August, sexually assaulted women at random on London's public transport network, as well as elsewhere. He now has convictions for attacking 13 women he encountered on the Tube and trains, as well as at music events and even in prison.

He also targeted vulnerable women involved in street sex work.

He killed Carmenza Valencia-Trujillo in March 2025 and Sheryl Wilkins five months later.

Prior to their murders, Levy had raped a third woman, in January 2025. The rape survivor told police what had happened while she was being arrested by Met officers for allegedly breaching a community banning order.

But the Met didn't properly engage with her and eventually closed the rape case. It was only re-opened when Levy went on to murder Valencia-Trujillo and Wilkins, which took place in the same section of a car park where he had raped the surviving victim.

The survivor later said in a statement "nobody ever listened to me" and that the police who interviewed her had spoken to her "like a child".

The Met and the Crown Prosecution Service have apologised over a series of decisions that left Levy free to roam the streets.

Supt Rob Gibbs said the new team is "an acknowledgement that we needed to change the way in which we were working" and move away from criminalising sex work.

"Women get stuck in the criminal justice system" for minor offences, he said - and this leads to "more sex working and actually we need to break that cycle".

Gibbs added that women involved in street-based sex work were at the "most harsh end of violence against women and girls".

While on patrol, the BBC met a woman we are calling Alice to protect her identity.

She told us most women she knows who are homeless and engage in sex work in Tottenham, north London, have not reported assaults for fear of the police and being arrested themselves.

She said two men have attacked her in separate incidents this year, including a man who violently assaulted her after she declined to take his money and sell him sex a few months ago.

"I was scared to contact the police," she said. "When I went to the hospital I begged the doctors, 'please don't phone the police because I'll get arrested'."

Alice said she first met the Met's female sex-worker liaison team when she was attacked by another man after falling asleep in a lift to her mum's apartment.

"They came and said, 'look, we're not here to arrest you, get you in trouble, we're here to support you'," Alice said.

'Women describe absolute terror from the police'

The Met says the new team has already improved safeguarding and increased reports of rape and sexual offences, as well as improving information sharing to identify "the most dangerous perpetrators of violence against women and girls".

However, the English Collective of Prostitutes (ECP) - which advocates for decriminalisation of sex workers - said that previous police clear-up operations on organised crime in London and around the country have led to a longstanding history of police prioritising prosecuting sex workers, rather than investigating male violence against them.

Laura Watson, a caseworker for the ECP, said a "very intense and aggressive police crackdown" in north London had led to "quite aggressive arrests of women" in Enfield and Haringey.

"In some cases, closure zones and antisocial behaviour orders which banned women from entire areas in some cases" led to "mass criminalisation because women were breaching those orders".

She said "women really describe absolute terror from the police, running up and down the road, running away from the police".

Most street sex workers are "mothers working to feed themselves and their children", she told us.

Prof Kate Brown, from the University of York, whose research focuses on policing interventions with sex workers, said creating such teams was not in itself a solution.

"Our research shows that sex work liaison officers can make a real difference to safety and access to justice, but only when they are designed and delivered in the right way," she said.

Her research centre is working with 12 police forces out of 43 in England and Wales, to safely implement sex worker liaison teams.

But she said these teams "cannot fix a system that continues to police and criminalise sex workers" and that "decriminalisation is the best way to deliver safety and justice" for them.

The Met said that if the team was "successful in improving confidence within the community", then this approach would be "rolled out across the force".

A Home Office spokesperson said: "Our commitment to halving violence against women and girls within a decade includes tackling the serious exploitation and abuse associated with prostitution.

"We expect the police to treat all victims of offences with dignity, and every investigation to be conducted thoroughly. We also continue to work with NGOs and charities to ensure women and girls at risk of sexual exploitation are protected."