During the 1970s and 1980s, Levin subjected many homosexual men and women to electroshock or chemical castration, and over 900 conscripts were forced to undergo involuntary sexual reassignment surgery.
[4][5] 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.
[1] In 1968, while he was completing his studies to earn his license as a psychiatrist, he submitted a letter to the Secretary of the South African Parliament in Cape Town, to request that he present his work using electric shocks as a treatment for "homosexuals and lesbians", before the Select Committee on the Immorality Amendment Act.
[8] It was at 1 Military Hospital, Voortrekkerhoogte, which is now known as Thaba Tshwane, that Levin developed combinations of electric shock and drug treatments for SADF conscripts that had been classified as "deviant.
[9][10] While working at Voortrekkerhoogte, Levin travelled to Greefswald, in an isolated region of northern South Africa, where he was the attending psychiatrist.
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).
[13] In 1994, with the end of apartheid, South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) heard testimony regarding the controversial nature of The Aversion Project Levin ran while in the SADF, details of which were published in 1999.
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.
[16] 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.
[15] Starting in 2010, journalists in South Africa began to publish in-depth articles about Levin role during the apartheid era, providing a backdrop to charges brought against him in Canada.
[20] 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".
[13] 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[11][21] in the "Northern province where anyone considered unfit for the Nationalist army’s Calvinist-scripted needs was sent for rehabilitation.
"[22] 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.
[24] 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).
[15] In March 2010, the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Alberta suspended Levin's license[25][26] over accusations of abuse after a male patient secretly filmed the psychiatrist allegedly making sexual advances.
[30] 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.
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.