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The case of Danial Gratton, a serial predator of children charged this week in an abduction of a seven-year-old girl in Edmonton, raises questions about whether Canada's liberal approach to sex offenders is working.
Community protection seems to have been far from a primary concern of the authorities. His prison terms were woefully brief. His parole came with little explanation or evidence of serious thought by the National Parole Board. The authorities told him he was a moderate risk to re-offend, yet was being given “the least restrictive measures to manage your risk in the community.”
Short sentences and extended community supervision – that has been how the system treated Mr. Gratton from the start. From 1982 to 1985 he committed multiple sexual assaults (the parole document that reveals this information has redacted the information on his victim or victims) and was sentenced in 1990 to just 90 days in jail, with 30 months probation. In 1991 he was convicted of sexual interference against a seven-year-old girl and received a 30-day intermittent sentence (presumably served on weekends) and six months probation. Finally, from 1996 to 2000 he sexually abused six children aged 2 to 8, one of them (by Mr. Gratton's estimate) 70 times. (The parole decision contains no details on the nature of his assaults.) For that he received just six years in jail and a long-term offender designation under which he is subject to a 10-year supervision order once set free. He was freed on parole after just four years.
The damage child predators do is not only to their individual victims but to community and family life. Young children have generally not been allowed to play alone for many years now, even in their front yards. Schoolyards, parks and ravines that used to be full of children left to their own devices are now largely empty. Whether this cautious response is proportionate is not the point; this is the way most families have chosen to balance the very small risk that their child will be abducted by a pedophile against the catastrophic harm of the worst cases. The justice system needs to respond to predators in a way that recognizes the harm they have done to children and communities. The more dangerous an offender, the more the system needs to err on the side of caution.
There is little evidence of caution in the little more than two pages of reasons from the National Parole Board in June, 2006, for Mr. Gratton's release. While the board cites a doctor's view that his risk was “low to moderate,” it doesn't explain what that view is based on. It seems simply to accept it at face value. The board said Mr. Gratton appeared “detached and clinical, which causes concern,” but in the very next line said, without explaining why, that it was releasing him.
Mr. Gratton is to be presumed innocent unless proven guilty. He is charged not only in the alleged abduction, but in a alleged sexual assault of a 10-year-old girl, and threats against another 10-year-old girl. He had been ordered never to be near children; in other words, he was recognized as a permanent high risk. The justice system appears to have been careless in handling that risk.
