LREM MP for Allier Laurence Vanceunebrock announced on Wednesday June 3 that she had tabled a bill to ban “conversion therapy”. These are used in an attempt to change an individual’s sexual orientation or induce abstinence.
- MP for Allier LREM Laurence Vanceunebrock has tabled a proposal from afar to ban “conversion therapies”.
- Proposed insidiously in France, they attempt to modify the sexual orientation of an individual or to push him towards chastity.
- It is not known how many people are victims of this phenomenon in France.
This is a sensitive subject that will soon be debated in the National Assembly. On Wednesday June 3, LREM MP for Allier, Laurence Vanceunebrock, announced that she had tabled a bill to ban “conversion therapy”. These are used in an attempt to change a person’s sexual orientation or convince them to choose chastity. Relatively known in the United States, they are much more informal in France and often offered in the form of “internship”, “treatment” or “seminar”.
If the European Parliament adopted, in March 2018, a non-binding text calling on States to prohibit these practices, nothing prevents these “therapies” in French law. This is why, today, the bill aims to create a “specific offense to prohibit these practices and provides for aggravating factors to take into account the situation of minors, a public particularly victim of these therapies”. This will allow complaints and lawsuits on this “very specific topic”. The aim is also to establishstatistics” which do not exist today in France, explains Laurence Vanceunebrock to AFP.
Homosexuality is no longer considered a psychiatric pathology since 1962 in France. However, it remains a disease for the promoters of “conversion therapies”, assures Laurence Vanceunebrock. Indeed, they are often offered by religious organizations that “cover a very broad spectrum of often insidious practices“, continues the deputy.
Electroshock sessions and forced marriages
Prior to this bill, politics carried out an information mission on the subject with his colleague Bastien Lachaud (MP for Seine-Saint-Denis for France Insoumise). On this occasion, she says she heard “testimonials from people who have been victims or witnesses of exorcisms” and “became aware of facts of rape or excision”. According to the two parliamentarians, medical “therapies” sometimes subject people who have been force-fed drugs to hypnosis or electroshock sessions. MEPs also report the case of individuals who have been victims of “forced marriages”.
“What is commonly called ‘conversion therapy’ continues to destroy the lives of LGBT people, especially young people who experience psychological and/or physical violence because of their sexual orientation or gender identity”also explains Bastien Lachaud on social networks.
The bill for the prohibition of #conversiontherapiesfollowing the fact-finding mission carried out with @LaurenceVanceu is filed.
I hope to be added to the agenda in the near future.@AssembleeNat. #LGBT pic.twitter.com/sHyAiskO8x— Bastien Lachaud (@LachaudB) June 3, 2020
An exam in early 2021?
In the United States, the number of victims of these “conversion therapies” was estimated at 700,000 in 2018. In France, there is no “objective measurement” of the phenomenon in France, deplore the parliamentarians, according to whom many young cannot lodge a complaint for fear of reprisals.
Currently, the text does not yet have “date of inclusion on the agenda of the National Assembly”. “The only problem is the schedule“parliamentarian, upset by the coronavirus health crisis,”but i will put the pressure”, assures Laurence Vanceunebrock, who hopes for an examination in early 2021.
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