Systemic Neglect: Why the Simon Levy Case Exposes the State's Failure to Protect Sex Workers

Both women sold sex. Both were targeted because Levy believed he could get away with it. He was not wrong to believe that — not historically, and not structurally. He was a product of an architecture the state built and refused to dismantle.

That belief was learned behavior. Levy's history of sexual offending dated back to 2018. Somewhere in those years, a system that knew what he was chose not to contain him in time. The sentencing remarks made it explicit: he selected sex workers as victims because he assumed impunity. The apparatus confirmed that calculation, repeatedly, across decades.

The price of invisibility

Women in prostitution face endemic violence. National Ugly Mugs (NUM), a UK charity providing an alternative reporting pathway, processed 1,047 reports of varying severity last year. Only 8% of those women consented to sharing their incidents with police. That gap is not a quirk of outreach — it is a measure of trust, and trust has been earned nowhere.

A 2024 snapshot survey of women involved in prostitution across Scotland found 90% had experienced violence, including attempted murder. A quarter had been sexually abused as children. A sixth were sexually exploited before age 18. These are not outliers. These are the material conditions of a class of women the state has decided are disposable.

What the framing got right — and what it obscured

To the press's credit, this case was covered differently. Victims were named as women first, sex workers second. Coverage centered the love in their lives — Carmenza's impending grandmotherhood, Sheryl's role as a mother of four with hopes and dreams. A third survivor, identified as "ED," gave testimony as a classical pianist trafficked from eastern Europe who vowed in court she would play music again and smile.

That framing matters. But it also exposes what we have been doing for decades: treating sex workers as fully human only in death, when names finally attach to grief rather than stigma. The structural violence does not begin with the murderer. It begins with the policing, prosecutorial, and policy choices that made Levy's calculus reasonable.

The machinery around the man

This is not a one-off malfunction. According to The Scotsman, courts chiefs have warned of longer delays without significant reform. Crown Court backlogs have surged, with thousands of cases outstanding beyond a year. The prison estate hovers near capacity, and reoffending rates remain stubbornly high — roughly 30% of adults released return within twelve months.

When the system cannot process cases in reasonable time, when victims do not trust the police enough to report, when the political class treats sex workers' safety as an afterthought — the predator's assumption of impunity becomes infrastructure. Levy did not invent the conditions. He used them.

What we owe the women Levy killed is not another round of inquiry. It is a reckoning with the material reality that the state treats sex workers' lives as collateral — and the structural reforms, from resourced policing accountability to survivor-led reporting pathways to harm-reduction frameworks, that would make that treatment untenable.