Three healthcare bodies that signed a document renouncing the practice of conversion therapy on the island of Ireland have failed to respond when asked by Gript how many verified instances of the practice being carried out they were aware of.
The College of Psychiatrists of Ireland (CPI), the Psychological Society of Ireland (PSI) and the Irish Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy (IACP) signed last Friday a memorandum of understanding, and said in a joint statement that the practice is “unethical, potentially harmful, and is not supported by evidence”.
The statement defines conversion therapy as therapy that “assumes certain sexual orientations or gender identities are inferior to other[s] and seeks to change or suppress them on that basis”.
When asked by Gript how many verified instances of conversion therapy being carried out in Ireland they were aware of, the CPI and PSI declined to comment, while the IACP ignored the correspondence altogether.
A request for specific examples of ‘gender conversion’ practices also went unanswered.
This comes after the Department of Children, Equality, Disability, Integration and Youth commissioned a report last year, titled An Exploration of Conversion Therapy Practices in Ireland. The report was produced by the School of Nursing and Midwifery at Trinity College Dublin, and consisted of a review of the literature on the topic, a survey of the LGBTI+ community and individual interviews with people who experienced conversion practices.
As was reported by Gript at the time, the report noted that the survey element “used a non-probability sample and is therefore not statistically representative of the wider LGBTI+ community”. Of the 278 people surveyed, 70 said that they had been offered conversion therapy, while 38 said that they had experienced it.
The report did not make clear if the 38 people are a subset of the 70 who were offered conversion therapy, or a separate group.
However, the report noted that when conducting the interviews with people who had experienced conversion therapy, the researchers chose a limit of 25 years because they wanted to focus on modern conversion therapy rather than on people’s experiences of what was then “a standard medical practice.”
When the same time limit is applied to the survey respondents, it shows that 21 – 24 people stated they had experienced conversion therapy in the last 25 years.
At the same time, the report stated that LGBT Ireland’s Ban Conversion Therapy Campaign “created a steering committee which also supported the recruitment of participants and promoted the research”.
Minister Roderic O’Gorman has previously stated that legislating to ban conversion therapy is a “priority” of his in Government.