The consultation on a conversion therapy ban in England and Wales has been published, but raises many questions that have yet to be clarified.
The government has proposed a two-pronged approach to a ban. Firstly, giving sentencing courts power to impose tougher sentences for physically violent criminal acts that are motivated by conversion therapy.
Secondly, a new offence would prohibit ‘talking conversion therapy’ which would require a coercive or control element; and be motivated by conversion therapy – which is defined as having the ‘intention of changing a person’s sexual orientation or changing them to or from being transgender’. The proposals are universal, with the intention that the proposed ‘protections’ would extend to attempts to change a person from, for instance, transgender to their real gender.
