Britain’s police forces are grappling with a “vast and rising tide of sexual violence”, a senior officer has warned, as the growing number of registered offenders places immense pressure on the criminal justice system.
Metropolitan Police Deputy Assistant Commissioner Kevin Southworth highlighted that the capital’s force, the UK’s largest, is currently monitoring more than 10,000 registered sex offenders.
This figure represents a significant increase of over 1,000 individuals in just the past few years.
Speaking to reporters, Mr Southworth attributed this surge partly to a national rise in online child sexual abuse, alongside an increased number of rape and domestic abuse cases now resulting in charges.
“We have a very high number of sexually violent people and people with sexual interest in children and women that is incredibly challenging for policing and for the criminal justice system to manage in its broadest sense,” Mr Southworth said.
“To the degree that, whilst we know now (Simon) Levy is one of the most dangerous and prolific offenders we’ve encountered in recent times, if you go back to spring of last year, at that point, he was one of many people who was involved in sexual offences and was on the registered sex offenders list, but not necessarily one that would have stood out from others at that time.”
Mr Southworth said Levy would only have come to notice as a particularly dangerous offender when his crimes escalated in 2025, even though he had been accused of rape and multiple sexual assaults in 2023 and 2024.
“At that point, that offending alone wouldn’t necessarily in 2023 and 24 have stood him out from a vast number of other registered sex offenders and prolific offenders in our midst.
“Sadly, because of the scale of what we’re dealing with, we face unfortunately a very vast and rising tide of sexual violence.
“What has stood this man out to me now, and to us all, is the acceleration in his offending in this last nine months to 12 months of 2025.”
Levy carried out a harrowing rape in which he broke his victim’s collarbone and smothered her until she was unconscious in January 2025, and went on to murder two other women in March and August that year, as well as sexually assaulting a string of strangers on the Tube network.
In September last year, Mr Southworth warned that the growing number of sex offenders would be “an increasingly challenging issue” for the Met.
As well as a rise in the number of rape and domestic abuse cases being charged, he pointed to a new generation of men who are more likely to be abusive because of material they have accessed online.
Speaking at the London Policing Board, he said: “We need to somehow ape the journey we’ve been on in tackling radicalisation, extremism, in our communities, in the violence against women and girls (VAWG) space in terms of tackling online VAWG and harms.
“There can be no doubt in my mind, having seen far too many cases, that so much of the sexual violence and domestic violence that we see is driven by terrible misogynistic attitudes propagated online and driving, perhaps, dare I say it, a generation of young people, and young men in particular, who may be more prone to be either domestically or sexually abusive.
“And that, again, is something that I think we need to look at, other models that I’ve seen in counter-terrorism and indeed in gang crime, to try to tackle overall levels of online harm.”
