Aubrey Levin

Education Levin completed high school in 1954 and began his medical studies at the University of Pretoria supported by a South African Defence Force (SADF) scholarship. Some of his colleagues called him Dr Shock. They still bear psychic scars from their Greefswald experiences, which some described as "torture". He performed chemical castrations at the hospitals.

A 2014 Salon article said that up to 900 people, who had been involuntarily drafted into the South African army, many of them aged 16 to 24 years old, were "subjected to forced sexual reassignment surgeries" (SRS). In the report he was referred to as the "Colonel."

In June 1997, the Health and Human Rights Project (HHRP) submitted its report to the TRC in which Levin was singled out as a key figure in the "torture" of gay men in the SADF.

In October 1999, the 132-page report entitled "The Aversion Project: human rights abuses of gays and lesbians in the SADF by health workers during the apartheid era", funded by the Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust and commissioned by South Africa's medical research council and human rights groups, was published.

In 2000, The Daily Mail and Guardian published a "chilling investigative series", including a July 2000 article published by The Guardian which provided details on the report. The same journalist also reported on Levin's sexual abuse trial in 2012 in Alberta, Canada. In an interview with The Guardian in 2000, Levin said that his aversion therapy only caused slight pain and all his patients wanted to be cured. The report "detailed castration and electric shocks". Terry Bell, the author of the 2003 non-fiction, Unfinished business: South Africa, apartheid, and truth, wrote an article entitled "In pursuit of 'Dr Shock'" in which he decried the way in which Levin had evaded justice in South Africa.

A 2014 AlterNet article, republished in Salon, listed the Aversion Project, which was undertaken in South-Africa during the apartheid era, as one of the top ten "most evil medical experiments".

In 2014, one of Levin's former patients, Gordon Torr, wrote a novel entitled Kill Yourself and Count to 10 about a fictional SADF conscript who was mistakenly thrust into a brutal reeducation program, run by a rogue psychiatrist who used the young men as his experimental toys. Torr based the novel on his own experience in the apartheid era Greefswald camp in the "Northern province where anyone considered unfit for the Nationalist army's Calvinist-scripted needs was sent for rehabilitation."

Saskatchewan, Canada

In 1995 Levin was working at the Fort England Hospital in Grahamstown, when he learned that the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) report had named him as one of the abusers of human rights.

In Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, Levin was for a short time the Regional Psychiatric Centre's regional director.

In the late 1990s, the TRC requested that Levin testify in South Africa to respond to the claims against him in the submission made by the Health and Human Rights Project (HHRP). over accusations of abuse after a male patient secretly filmed the psychiatrist allegedly making sexual advances.

The Crown decided to go ahead with nine of the original 21 cases. During the trial, a jury was shown the graphic video of Levin touching a patient, which had been secretly recorded on the patient's [camera wristwatch].

On 28 January 2013, a jury found Levin guilty of three charges of sexual assault against male patients, not guilty of two other charges of sexual assault, while a mistrial was declared in reference to a further four counts. He was convicted of "sexual assaulting three of his patients between 2008 and 2010."

A May 2013 CBC article questioned how "justice officials, the academic community" and the Colleges of Physicians and Surgeons had not been aware of Levin's history. A crown prosecutor said that the right hand did not know what the left hand was doing. The juror said she was approached on a train platform in January and offered $1,000 or $10,000 in a white envelope, to bring in a not-guilty verdict. The juror informed police and was subsequently dismissed. Although Court of Queen's Bench Justice Karen Horner said that Levin's actions were both "selfish" and "reckless", she considered Levin's plea of post-traumatic stress disorder and depression, and sentenced her to an "18-month conditional sentence with house arrest and 180 hours of community service."

Court of Appeal of Alberta

On 23 April 2014 the Court of Appeal of Alberta, in a unanimous decision, upheld the 2013 conviction. Levin was ordered to report, within 48 hours, to begin a five-year sentence at an unnamed institution.

Early release from prison In 2016, CBC obtained information that the Parole Board of Canada had granted Levin day parole. By March 2016 he was living in a halfway house. The 76-year-old had requested full pardon. Levin told the Parole Board that the "victims lied and that the police and the courts...had it in for [him]". Assessments included a "scathing" psychological evaluation, and statements that Levin appeared to "have little concern for [his] victims, that he was "manipulative" and presented himself as "victim of the system." Levin denied that he had "any sexual motive or basis for your sexual offences" and that he was not "aware that what he was doing was a criminal act in Canada as it's allowed in his home country of South Africa."

On 1 February 2023, Levin applied for release from sex offender registration. Then aged 84, elderly, infirm, cognitively impaired, and allegedly unable to meet the physical registration requirements, Levin then of Vancouver was granted early termination when the Crown did not oppose.