Daphne Bramham: Allowing paroled murderers to visit brothels isn't just stupid, it's illegal and deadly
Credit to Author: Daphne Bramham| Date: Sat, 01 Feb 2020 00:46:30 +0000
It is unbelievable that men who have killed their intimate partners would not only be allowed, but encouraged, to go to brothels while they are on parole and out on day passes.
But that’s exactly what Canada’s parole board agreed to last September for Eustachio Gallese, 51, who had brutally murdered his wife in 2004.
He had sexual needs, his caseworker told the board. But because Gallese wasn’t deemed ready to have relationships with a woman, buying sexual services was the solution to satisfying his “sexual needs.”
It’s a solution that blatantly disregards the fact that buying sexual services is a criminal offence, as is operating a brothel.
But, more tragically, the order was approved with cruel disregard for the unsuspecting women on whom Gallese was set loose.
On Jan. 23 this year, Gallese turned himself in to Quebec City police and pointed them to the hotel room where they found the body of 22-year-old Marylène Lévesque. He’s since been charged with murder.
Lévesque had defensive wounds and had been stabbed, according to Le Journal de Quebec. The newspaper also reported that Lévesque had worked in a massage parlour and that Gallese was a regular customer, and had bought her gifts including a television for Christmas.
Marylène Lévesque was killed in a Sainte-Foy hotel room Jan. 22. Parolee Eustachio Gallese was arrested in connection with the death. Photo: Facebook
But both the Montreal Gazette and Le Soleil reported that Gallese had been banned from the brothel because he had been violent with several others who worked there.
Lévesque made the mistake of meeting him at a hotel.
In 1997, Gallese was convicted for conjugal violence. Seven years later, Gallese murdered his 32-year-old partner, Chantal Deschênes, beating her first with a hammer and then repeatedly stabbing her.
He was sentenced in 2006 to life in prison with no chance of parole for 15 years, and deemed at high risk of committing violence against a partner a year later.
But, at some point, that risk evaluation was revised to moderate and in 2016 — five years before he was due for parole — Gallese was allowed supervised outings.
Last March, he was released to a halfway house. The parole board denied him full parole last September at a hearing. A written summary of the decision indicates that parole board members were caught off guard when Gallese discussed his interactions with women over the previous six months.
“During the hearing, your parole officer underlined a strategy that was developed with the goal that would allow you to meet women in order to address your sexual needs,” it says.
It went on to say: “The hearing allowed us to realize you managed, and this with the approval of your case-management team, relations with women that the board considers inappropriate.”
It was a strategy, the board noted, that “paradoxically constitutes a worrying and significant risk factor.” It ordered a re-examination of the terms in six months.
Two months shy of that re-evaluation, Lévesque is dead.
How many other parolees, if any, have similar orders in place is not clear. The Parole Board of Canada did not respond to questions before this column’s deadline.
But even if it is a singular case, the decision in Gallese’s case reflects some deeply disturbing notions.
The first is that men — even violent criminals — have a right to satiate their sexual appetites with another person.
The second is the perverse idea that if a violent man is incapable or not ready to form a healthy relationship with another person, it’s OK for him to engage in unhealthy relationships where, as the buyer, he has power over the seller.
Finally, putting the sexual needs of a violent criminal ahead of the safety of other Canadians, including those who do sex work, suggests a grotesque hierarchy that is an affront to the constitutional and moral ideals of equality.
Two former parole board members have posited that the reason Gallese was allowed to visit massage parlours is that 14 of Quebec’s parole board members have less than three years’ experience and several have never dealt with cases involving dangerous offenders.
They suggest that more experienced board members might have challenged the caseworker’s plan.
That may be so. But it does raise questions about what qualifications these government-appointed board members have. One might expect that at the very least they are reasonable people who are reasonably well-informed.
But what reasonable person would knowingly place a violent offender in an illegal brothel to commit the criminal offence of paying for sex?
And it doesn’t seem unreasonable that parole board caseworkers, as well as inexperienced parole board members, ought to know at least something about the murdered and missing Indigenous women, or the epidemic of sexual violence that translates into one death every 36 hours, or the fact that only five per cent of sexual assaults are ever reported, partly because only one in five of those will be dismissed as unfounded by police.
Public Safety Minister Bill Blair ordered an investigation by Corrections Canada and the parole board to determine the circumstances of Gallese’s release and provide recommendations for change.
“We want to be clear that the use of sexual services is not a practice we support in the case management of offenders,” Esther Mailhot, Corrections Canada’s communications adviser, said in an emailed response.
Corrections is taking Gallese’s case “very seriously” and “any recommendations … will be reviewed and implemented to prevent similar incidents from occurring in the future.”
Why this tragedy happened is simple: The people responsible for keeping the public safe failed.
The more complicated question is, how did the institutions and the culture at both Corrections Canada and the parole board allow those individuals to fail so spectacularly?
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