Libby Squire's mother urges women to report non-contact sex offences

Lisa Squire has been campaigning for women to be better protected and for non-contact sexual offences to be treated seriously

The mother of a woman murdered in Hull has urged victims to report non-contact sexual offences to the police.

Lisa Squire's 21-year-old daughter Libby went missing in January 2019.

Pawel Relowicz was jailed for at least 27 years for raping and murdering the student. But he had committed a string of sex crimes before the killing.

Mrs Squire told a committee of MPs that non-contact sexual offences, including voyeurism and indecent exposure, needed to be treated as "serious crimes".

After speaking at the Home Affairs Committee on Wednesday, Mrs Squire, from High Wycombe, Buckinghamshire, told the BBC: "My main message to the committee was that government need to take non-contact sexual offences far more seriously and treat them for the red flag offences that they are.

"We talked about reporting and encouraging women and girls to come forward to report non-contact sexual offences.

"If somebody is a victim of a non-contact sexual offence it's so important for them to report [it] to the police."

Mrs Squire told MPs how her daughter was a victim of a non-contact sex offence months before she was killed

She told committee members how such offences can be a stepping stone to more serious sex crimes.

Mrs Squire also described how her daughter had called her months before the killing about being a victim of a non-contact sex crime but had not encouraged Libby to report it to officers.

"Libby herself, in November before she was killed, rang me to say she had been a victim of a non-contact sexual offence and I didn't tell her to report [it] - she was absolutely furious - and I talked her down.

"I didn't think to tell her to report it because I didn't know better then. I know better now."

She said Relowicz had a "long history" of non-contact sexual offences and added: "I would've had that man locked up for life".

Libby was murdered while a student on a night out in Hull

Calling for tougher sentences, Mrs Squire told MPs more work was needed to tackle offenders including further research on treatments for perpetrators as well as data collection.

Following the hearing, she told the BBC: "It was really encouraging to be there.

"I just hope that they [committee members] produce a report with recommendations that we can move forwards and do better.

"It's about everybody from all different areas of society coming together and working towards stopping these acts."

Libby Squire's body was found in the Humber Estuary seven weeks after she disappeared but pathologists were unable to establish how the student died, or whether she was still alive when she went into the river, because of the amount of time her body had been in the water.

Relowicz had previous convictions for voyeurism, performing sex acts in public and stealing underwear from women's homes and was later linked through DNA to several unsolved non-contact sexual offences.

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