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Dale Kunath

Photo by Courtesy Global Calgary

Even in the soul-darkening world of prosecuting child abuse, Kunath’s case stood out. “This is, in my career, the most serious case of child abuse I’ve dealt with,” Crown prosecutor Jayme Williams said at the time of trial. In 2010, Kunath had tortured a six-week-old baby: He burned the baby’s feet with a lighter, tore the boy’s penis and repeatedly sodomized him with household objects. Doctors surmised that the child would suffer lifelong handicaps as a result of the mistreatment. At trial, Kunath’s main defence was that his torture of the infant was not sexually motivated, but was due to his anger at his girlfriend spending time with the baby’s biological father. In August, 2017 — not quite seven years after the crime — Kunath was released on day parole with the note that he had “showed regret.”

John Austen Gallienne

Photo by Kingston Whig-Standard

As a choirmaster at Anglican churches in Kingston and Victoria throughout the 1970s and 1980s, Gallienne had unfettered access to molest and sexually assault scores of young boys. One of his tricks was apparently to put his penis in the mouths of his young charges, telling them it would make them sing better. Although 19 of Gallienne’s victims have now come forward to police, he has received only negligible prison terms for the abuse. A 1990 conviction for the serial sexual abuse of 13 boys, two of whom later took their own lives, netted a sentence of only four and a half years — about four months per boy. Two more convictions came while he was in prison, but he was nevertheless released by October, 1994. By 2004, Gallienne was found to be leading another choir at Ottawa’s St. John the Evangelist Anglican Church. More convictions for historical sex offences arrived in both 2011 and 2016, but each time Gallienne was merely handed probation or house arrest. Just this month, he was found guilty of two more sex offences from the 1980s. “I just had so much rage and would lash out at anyone and everything,” one of his most recent accusers wrote in a victim impact statement quoted by the Kingston Whig-Standard. He ended the letter by wishing he could get Gallienne alone in a room to see “what I could do with the rage you’ve created.”