Uncorrected oral evidence: Draft Conversion Practices Bill, HC 741

Oral evidence, 29 October 2026.

Witnesses

Stephen Kiely, Kai O’Doherty and Professor Ilias Trispiotis.

Chair

Good afternoon, everyone. Today, we are holding our first oral evidence session on the Government’s draft Conversion Practices Bill. The Joint Committee has been appointed to consider and report on the draft Bill, which sets out provisions to prevent and criminalise abusive and harmful conversion practices. I say now, on behalf of the Committee, many thanks to all our witnesses today for attending. The Committee is dealing with highly sensitive matters, of which many people watching or listening may have direct personal experience. We understand that some people may find today’s evidence session distressing and difficult to listen to. There are strongly and honestly held opinions, and we ask all those listening to do so respectfully. Lastly, there are several organisations that can offer support; these are listed on our website. I am sure that we all wish to approach these very important matters with due care and respect. To begin, may I ask the witnesses to introduce themselves?

Professor Trispiotis

I am chair in human rights law at the University of Leeds. I also chair the legal forum of the Ban Conversion Practices Coalition.

Kai O’Doherty

I am the director of policy and research at Galop, which is the UK’s anti-abuse charity for LGBT+ people.

Stephen Kiely

I am the head of policy and public affairs at Stonewall, which is a national LGBT organisation that has been campaigning for equality and inclusion for nearly the past 40 years.

Chair

I thank the three of you. Before I hand over to the Committee so that we can start our questions, I have two points to note. Danny Beales sends his apologies for not being here today as he has an unfortunate clash with another committee further down the building; he asked me to put that on the public record. Secondly, I remind everybody about the sub judice rule—that is, not to refer to ongoing, live, extant court cases. With that, I pass over to Lord Isaac.

Lord Isaac

May I start by declaring my interest as a former chair of Stonewall and the Equality and Human Rights Commission? I should also indicate that I know Stephen Kiely and have met him from time to time in his capacity as the head of policy at Stonewall. How prevalent are conversion practices in England and Wales? What do they typically entail? Can you tell us where conversion practices generally take place? In your view, are any groups at particular risk? How great a concern are overseas practices? That is quite a few questions, but can I ask you to start with how prevalent conversion practices are in England and Wales?

Stephen Kiely

First, I thank the Committee for taking evidence from us here today. We have been really impressed by the engagement from the Committee so far; it is clear that you want to move at pace, which is really welcome. We have been campaigning on this Bill for eight years, so it is good to see that we are all on the same timeline now. Before I start, I want to say that, although this is a complex piece of legislation, it has a very simple purpose: to ban and prevent a very specific form of abuse. We do see that abuse happening in real life, though. The Government’s own national LGBT survey found that 5% of respondents had been offered conversion practices and 2% had undergone them. We also have new research now, which will come out next Tuesday—I can send advance copies to everyone—from a poll that we did with YouGov of some 3,500 LGBT adults. It found that 4% of respondents had been offered conversion practices and 1% had undergone them. We find that trans people, people from ethnic minorities and people from religious backgrounds are around two to three times more likely to face conversion practices. We also have live anecdotal evidence from Galop showing that its services are repeatedly being used by people who present having gone through conversion practices across the UK. So, unfortunately, this is a real and live issue that continues to be present in different communities and different societies.

Kai O’Doherty

From a Galop point of view, we see hundreds of contacts around conversion practices annually. We are an anti-abuse charity, so a lot of these cases are in a domestic abuse context. However, research that we put out in 2022—a representative quantitative analysis—showed that there were disproportionate levels of risk depending on parts of the community. For example, four in 10 trans respondents had been offered or undergone conversion practices, and the level was similarly high for non-binary people. Asexual and aromantic people were also at higher risk, with one in three having been offered or undergoing conversion practices, and young people aged between 18 and 24 were also disproportionately likely to be impacted. It is also true that people living in rural areas were more likely to be impacted. In terms of where the practices happen, Government data and international literature are clear that the majority of conversion practices happen in religious settings, but the level in pseudo-healthcare settings was also quite high. According to the Government’s research, 51% of conversion practices happened in religious settings, 19% happened in healthcare settings and 16% happened in family settings. However, in Galop’s most recent report, “Still Not Illegal”—we are proud to say that it was used to show the testimonies and evidence of hundreds of cases of conversion practices that have come to our services in the past three years—we found that the majority of those contexts were actually in coercive and controlling behaviours, with parents being the most likely to be the perpetrators of that abuse. However, religious settings were still very prevalent, at 27% of the cases that we analysed, with 13% of them happening in pseudo-healthcare environments.

Professor Trispiotis

I will come at this question from a comparative perspective. We operate in a context where the United Nations and the Council of Europe have put forward specific recommendations for conversion practices to be banned in law, specifically in criminal law. A number of countries across the world have banned these practices. Many of those countries have followed recommendations from survivor-led studies published in peer-reviewed journals, which show beyond any doubt and in the most credible way that conversion practices affect a wide range of LGBT+ people. These practices take place in a wide range of contexts and are often clandestine and are under-reported. Many of these studies are cited in the UN’s SOGI report from 2020, as well as in the Council of Europe’s resolution. There are survivor-led studies from Canada, Victoria in Australia and, recently, Norway. They share many of their findings with the findings that Galop and Stonewall have put forward. I want quickly to add something on your extraterritorial application question. We operate in the context that I just described. However, conversion practices are still not illegal in most countries across the world. There is a clear risk that conversion practices might be facilitated from within a country and take place elsewhere, so it is very positive that the draft Bill includes an extraterritorial provision. We can discuss this more technically if you have more questions about it.

Lord Issac

What do the conversion practices typically entail? I know that this is a sensitive area, but it is important for the Committee to understand what you believe the conversion practices typically to be.

Kai O’Doherty

Again, research suggests that those settings are the most consistent. In terms of what the practices themselves look like, in our 2022 report, “There was nothing to fix”, we looked at the range of behaviours occurring in the UK. They include things such as being pressured or forced to seek or participate in medical or psychotherapeutic practices or interventions; being manipulated, controlled or having their movement monitored; being threatened with homelessness or being made homeless; being threatened with or made to travel to another country; being verbally, emotionally and psychologically abused; or being sexually abused. By way of an example, I want to bring the Committee recent cases that have to come to Galop. We spoke to a young lesbian woman, Jane, who had experienced conversion practices from her parents’ extended families and members of her church. Often, cases involve multiple perpetrators. Upon discovering her sexuality, Jane’s parents forced her to bathe in holy water and she was taken to another part of the country where the church publicly shamed her, forced her to the floor and dragged her along it to change her sexuality. When she refused to go to that church any longer, her parents physically abused her and said that she was better off dead. At this point, Jane fled from the house and was sofa-surfing for several weeks. Importantly, social workers failed to understand this as conversion practices, advising that she be housed back with her extended family, who were part of that community. She was homeless for two months and it was only with support from Galop that we were able to find her alternative housing. This also demonstrates that most conversion practices happen as part of a pattern. They happen within different settings, and they can look like different incidents which, added up, create this clear abuse.

Baroness Brown of Silvertown

I am glad you talked about other jurisdictions. My understanding is that there have been no prosecutions in other jurisdictions. On that basis, what do the panel think the impact might be of not passing this legislation?

Professor Trispiotis

Thank you very much for the question. You are right that there have not been many prosecutions in other jurisdictions that have banned conversion practices, but we should put this in its relevant context. The bans that have been enacted in Victoria, Canada, Norway, France and Germany are very recent bans. Those jurisdictions have legislated over the past two to five years and there has not been time for the prosecutions to be put forward and for we academics and researchers to be able to analyse them. There might not have been many prosecutions, but it is difficult to find out specific numbers. As a law professor and an expert in this area, I have looked, and the data for some of those prosecutions is not readily available to the public. Also, many of those offences are very recent. On the second part of your question, about what would be the effect of this legislation if it gets passed—

Baroness Brown of Silvertown

If it does not get passed.

Professor Trispiotis

If it does not get passed, LGBT+ people will still be at risk of conversion practices in our country. From the research that Galop, Stonewall and others have carried out, including the Government’s impact assessment of this legislation, we know that these practices are taking place in this country. We know that they fall between the gaps of existing criminal offences, so if the law does not get passed, unfortunately the protection will not be enough.

Stephen Kiely

If the law does not get passed, it will be hard for statutory authorities to identify conversion practices. By their nature, conversion practices are extremely hidden and complex, so it is very hard to capture data, much like with domestic abuse. Often, people do not know that they are going through it for a very long time. Consent is an issue. Passing a law will give clear guidance to statutory authorities, courts and professionals that conversion practices are happening, but we also need to think about the deterrent effect. They are happening, they are real and present, and anything we can do to pass robust legislation in this place is really important.

Kai O’Doherty

What we can learn from other jurisdictions is to make sure that this Bill is not weaker than those Bills. We already see the ways in which this Bill is weaker than international precedents, as well as the suggestions and recommendations of the United Nations. It is a great start. We are really happy to see what we have before us, but we urge you, throughout this process, to understand that, by only covering, for example, change and not suppression, and by having a distinction between abusive and non-abusive conversion practices, this Bill is setting a different precedent from international comparators. We need to make sure that it is not weaker, if we are already seeing that those Bills are not being used as they ought to be.

Olivia Bailey

I start by drawing everyone’s attention to my entry in the register of interests, in particular that I was the Minister responsible for drafting this legislation initially and, subsequent to being Minister, in my capacity as Chair of the Women and Equalities Committee, I have had a number of meetings with a number of today’s panellists. In my capacity as Minister, I met most of the panellists we are hearing from. Thank you very much for your answers so far. To follow on from Baroness Brown’s question, as a Committee we have heard evidence from people arguing that existing criminal legislation should be sufficient to prosecute conversion practice abuse. Would you like to say anything about that? Why do you think there is a necessity for criminal legislation in this space?

Professor Trispiotis

Thank you for the question. Existing legislation is insufficient to protect people from conversion practices. Coercive control—the offence of controlling or coercive behaviour—is insufficient because it covers only people in former or current intimate relationships and family members, and we know from the evidence that we have that conversion practices do not take place just within these contexts. Hate crime, and the regulation of hate crime, is also insufficient because it would require a basic offence that then is aggravated on the basis of hostility towards someone. Again, conversion practices very often do not involve an underlying offence. Very often, the motivation might be benevolent, so they would not be captured by hate crime. With regard to tort law, negligence and harassment would also be inadequate to protect people from conversion practices. In terms of tort law, private law and the law of negligence, it would also be insufficient to protect LGBT+ people from conversion practices because it would be very difficult to prove that, especially a pseudo-therapist, for example, had a duty of care towards someone that was breached, and that that breach led to the injury that gave rise to the negligence claim. Tort law, at the same time, has very specific limitation periods. Again, we know from the evidence that we have that conversion practice survivors can take years to realise the harm that these practices have caused them. On a more fundamental level, when we are talking about tort law, negligence and private law, they frame the problem as a private dispute between two parties, whereas what we are describing here, conversion practice, is a public wrong. It is a form of discriminatory abuse that stigmatises and perpetuates the social subordination of a protected group of people, and it is a wrong sufficiently important for criminal law to intervene, as it does with other cases of discriminatory abuse.

Sir Jeremy Wright

Good afternoon. I should register the fact that I have spoken to all three of you before about this Bill. It is good to see you again. If I may, I will focus on the definition of conversion practice in clause 1 of the Bill. Others will come on to talk about abuse and the definition of serious harm, but I want to focus on that first element and ask you your view on the breadth or narrowness of that concept—and, specifically, one or two aspects of that. First—this will be familiar to you because we have discussed this point—I want to make sure we are all on the same page and that it is your understanding that conversion practice does include seeking to persuade someone not to adopt either a particular sexual orientation or a particular transgender identity, as well as seeking to change a pre-existing sexual orientation or transgender identity. My second question, which Kai has already adverted to, is on your view on whether or not—I suspect the answer is not—suppression is included in the current definition. If it is not included, should it be?

Professor Trispiotis

Thank you for the question. On whether the definition covers both change and trying to influence someone to adopt an identity they do not have—

Sir Jeremy Wright

Or not adopt.

Professor Trispiotis

Or not adopt an identity. A hypothetical case I am thinking of in response would involve children who might not have a formed identity, sexual orientation or gender identity. This is an area where we have specific protections for children’s rights, both from the children’s rights Act and internationally, which give children specific rights to development, to non-discrimination and to self-determination. These rights would have to be considered in this context. So the definition of conversion practices that this Bill adopts, and that any future Bill might adopt—they might be different or they might be the same—would have to be interpreted in the light of children’s rights protections that are very well established in the law in England and Wales.

Sir Jeremy Wright

That is understood, professor. I just want to understand whether, in addition to those perfectly fair points, you accept that the language in clause 1 at the moment would include both scenarios.

Professor Trispiotis

In my view, it includes both scenarios, yes: to believe or not to believe that you have or do not have. The current definition is sufficient to capture change efforts of conversion practices, and it is insufficient to cover suppression acts. I will add a few things on suppression and then I will pass to my colleagues. Again, to take a comparative lens, this is the first definition of conversion practices that I have encountered—out of all the countries that have banned it, the United Nations report, the Council of Europe recommendations, and the research under way on an EU level—that does not include suppression. All the definitions of conversion practice that I am aware of—

Sir Jeremy Wright

It might perhaps be helpful to everyone to establish the definitions here. Can you explain to us what your definition of “suppression” would be in this context?

Professor Trispiotis

The definition of “suppression” in this context would be acts, or any other type of conduct, that aim to convince someone to, make someone or control someone so that they deny, for example, their sexual orientation or gender identity, conceal their sexual orientation or gender identity, or behave in ways that are incongruous with their sexual orientation or gender identity. All the examples of bans that exist at the moment have used examples of suppression, either in the text of the legislation itself, as New Zealand does, or in explanatory notes. I am not aware of a jurisdiction that has defined “suppression”, but most jurisdictions, including international recommendations, use illustrative examples of suppression that capture what I just said: concealing, denying, acting in ways that are incongruous, etc.

Kai O’Doherty

To give you real examples of what this means on the ground, conversion practices have evolved over time. They have become increasingly covert. Therefore, people will be wise enough, if they want to continue to abuse, to say not, “Do not be gay,” but just, “Do not show that you’re gay.” I say this as if it is historical, but you will hear from survivors in coming weeks about where that is not historical. Indeed, many religious examples that come to us involve people being told, “Just don’t show anyone you’re gay,” or, “Don’t present as transgender”—but they are not being told not to be those things explicitly. It is crucial that change and suppression are covered in the definition.

Sir Jeremy Wright

Just to be clear, your view would be that “Don’t be gay” is covered but “Don’t show that you’re gay” currently is not.

Kai O’Doherty

That would be a crude way of putting it, but I would agree. I will give some recent examples from our services. One is clients being blocked from seeing or interacting with friends and forced to end relationships or barred from participating in activities outside of the home, while also being subjected to surveillance of their movements and communication. We know well that, in domestic abuse, those would be versions of coercive control, but when that happens in a religious setting, as Ilias has explained, that is not covered. A client being refused food until they deny that they are LGBT+—is that change or is that suppress? There is a reason why every other country has felt the need to include both, and it is because the change act is so overly specific that it does not account for the evolution of these practices. I fail to understand what is unique about Britain that means that we feel that it is immoral and abusive to change someone’s sexual orientation or gender identity but that it would be okay to be told not to express or to suppress it. I do not think that holds weight.

Stephen Kiely

This is an area that warrants a lot of discussion. We need to make sure we get this right because this is a critical part of the Bill. We find, in suppression, that it can be very insidious and corrosive when people are told that, if they ever acted on being gay or thought about being gay—if they ever went near it—religious leaders, parents and such would know that they were gay. That has a real corrosive, long-term and life-changing impact on your identity. That is very much a part of suppression, which needs to be included in this part of the Bill.

Sir Jeremy Wright

Just to make sure that we have covered the ground, is there anything any of you want to add on either the narrowness or the breadth of the current definition of conversion practice? As I say, we will come on to the other elements in a moment.

Professor Trispiotis

Can I make a quick point? At the moment, the definition of conversion practices does not include the discriminatory presumption. Again, to take a comparative lens, most definitions of conversion practices that exist, including the UN recommendations and the Council of Europe resolution, describe conversion practices as efforts to change or suppress sexual orientation or gender identity on the basis that this identity is considered inferior. Historically and sociologically, this is what conversion practices are. They target LGBT+ identities specifically because those identities are considered problematic. So conversion practices are inherently abusive, as the Government recognise, but they are not just abuse—

Sir Jeremy Wright

Forgive me, but the Government do not recognise that all conversion practices are abusive, because do they not make a distinction between those that are and those that are not in the framing of this legislation?

Professor Trispiotis

You are absolutely right, but I have a slight correction. The opening sentence of the Government’s equality impact assessment is: “The government’s position is that conversion practices are abuse.” So there is an inconsistency there between the Government’s own equality impact assessment and the distinction between abusive and non-abusive conversion practices that the text of the Bill currently draws.

Sir Jeremy Wright

Would it be your recommendation that there should be no such distinction? Does it follow from what you said a moment ago that you would seek to add a discriminatory motivation clause or some language that reflects that motivation in this process?

Professor Trispiotis

Yes—it is a discriminatory presumption. It would not be something for the prosecution to prove on top of the other elements of the conduct, but—

Sir Jeremy Wright

A rebuttable presumption or a non-rebuttable presumption?

Professor Trispiotis

I think the model that should be used is the Equality Act 2010 model for direct discrimination, given that we are talking about a case of discriminatory abuse. With regards to abusive conversion practices, the distinction between abusive and non-abusive conversion practices is very problematic. Again, it does not appear in any other legislation in this area in any other countries that have banned these practices, or in any international recommendations. There is a lot of academic literature and there are credible sources that show for specific legal reasons why conversion practices are always inherently abusive because of how they violate the human dignity of LGBT+ people. The distinction between abusive and non-abusive conversion practices suggests that some of those practices might be non-abusive and therefore might be legitimate and might continue. That is expressively harmful for LGBT+ people. In terms of criminal law, as a lawyer, I think that it is important to recognise that, if this distinction is omitted by the Bill, it does not mean that the criminal threshold is going to get lower. Abusive conversion practices—the way in which “abusive” is described at the moment in the Bill and in the explanatory notes—includes a wide range of practices, including those that are threatening, intimidating, coercive and controlling. It is very hard—I found it impossible—to find an example of a conversion practice from the Galop report or from other survivor reports that would not meet that threshold of being abusive. All of them are frightening and controlling, and they all involve an unequal power relationship between an LGBT+ person and someone who presents themselves as an “enlightened converter”. That is the language of the UN report. All those practices would, by definition, reach that first threshold, so it does not even help us to restrict the scope of the offence. It is redundant and symbolically harmful, this first threshold, in my opinion.

Naz Shah

I declare my interest in that I met with Stephen this week, which was really helpful—thank you. To follow on from the identity point that you have just made, professor—this may also apply to Stonewall—the draft Bill treats sexuality and transgender identity identically. Stonewall works on both those areas. Are there any relevant differences between them that the Committee should consider?

Stephen Kiely

The way the drafters have dealt with sexual orientation is to use the definition in the Equality Act, which is standard precedent in this area. Similarly, the drafters have used the definition of transgender identity from the Sentencing Act 2020, which derives from the Equality Act. We have seen from how the Bill is drafted that it can now include asexuality in the definition of sexual orientation, which is a very positive step from the Government’s own national LGBT survey—that people who are asexual experience conversion practices. Similarly, in the definition of transgender identity they have included non-binary identities as well. It is good to see that; it is important that legislation and law keeps pace with evolving identities. In the explanatory notes, the Government have explained why they can do that: it does not change the definition of gender reassignment in the Equality Act, so it makes sense why it is there.

Naz Shah

Just to build on that, the draft Bill defines “conversion practices” in a way that covers causing people to believe that they do not have a sexuality or gender identity but also that they do. Are you at all concerned that the services that support people to come out as gay or transgender might potentially be targeted in the scope of this Bill?

Stephen Kiely

That is a really good question. We are getting into the healthcare section of the Bill there, which is a really important part of it and one that we want to discuss a lot. It would be good if the Committee took evidence from regulators and clinical bodies. This is an area of concern for us; there is a healthcare clause in here that is quite broad, but it is doing a certain purpose. That is, first, to protect clinicians who offer legitimate, evidence-based care, so they are free to do that, from risk of prosecution. But we have an issue with the definition, which is very broad. The definition of a healthcare professional is both regulated and unregulated; likewise, the services that can be provided are very broad. The reason we have an issue with that is that we are hearing a lot of evidence from survivors who have experienced conversion practices from organisations that have rebranded as therapists or pseudo-counsellors, etc., which are now going to be exempt from conversion practice, because of how it is drafted. We have a simple solution—well, perhaps not simple—to this section, which it would be good to discuss. We would add a third section to the healthcare clause, which would mean that anyone who is engaging in this area would have to be regulated by a statutory professional regulatory body or listed on a register held by an organisation accredited by the Professional Standards Authority. So the first section would cover your psychiatrists and clinical psychologists, and the second section would cover your counsellors and psychotherapists, essentially. That would be a really important clause to add. First, it would mean that everyone who is regulated would now come under the exemption or the bar—but, equally, anyone who is outside of that and was practising could then be prosecuted.

Naz Shah

Finally, to Kai—

Chair

Is it still on healthcare, Naz?

Naz Shah

No. We went into healthcare, but I was trying to—

Chair

We did, so hold that question for a moment and I will come back to you. Given that we are in the healthcare part right now, would Lord Hope like to come in? We have been going into questions that you were going to ask, so maybe we can stay on that theme.

Lord Hope of Craighead

Good afternoon. I should say that I have no interests to declare. Your point encourages me to ask you about the position in Northern Ireland. I do not know whether any of you are familiar with the draft Bill in Northern Ireland, but what it contains a provision saying that the Act “does not apply in respect of therapy provided or carried out…by an individual registered by, or subject to regulation by” various regulated bodies, and “in accordance with the standards and code of ethics of that regulatory body that apply at the time the therapy is carried out”. If we had something of that kind written into the Bill, would that satisfy you? Is it too narrow or too broad, or what?

Stephen Kiely

I think that would satisfy—although I am interested in the views of everyone else. But I think we are broadly in the same place. We need a clause that protects people who are regulated by statute and people who are regulated by accredited bodies done by the Professional Standards Authority. We need a kind of dual regulation there.

Lord Hope of Craighead

There are two things—the regulator itself and then the fact that you are applying the standards that the regulatory body expects of you.

Stephen Kiely

If you were a counsellor, you would be part of the British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy, and you would be governed by their codes of conduct or codes of ethics, which outlaw—not outlaw but are against—conversion practices.

Lord Hope of Craighead

Professor, is the Northern Ireland example familiar to you? Is it in accordance with what other countries are doing?

Professor Trispiotis

It is familiar to me and in accordance with what other countries have done. All countries have a provision that aims to reassure legitimate therapy providers—I shall come to that in a second, but I want to answer your question directly. Yes, something like that would be essential to be added to the Bill. The memorandum of understanding on conversion therapy in the UK is signed up to by a group of organisations and regulators who have come together; they include the NHS, the BACP and the Royal College of General Practitioners, some of the leading healthcare bodies of this country. Their preference would be for a provision that is inserted that would apply only to professionals who are regulated by statutory professional regulatory bodies or, as Stephen said, are listed on a register held by an organisation accredited by the PSA. So it is very similar to what you are saying. Other countries have done this slightly differently: all countries that have banned conversion practices so far have a provision that aims to reassure healthcare professionals that they have the space they need to make their professional judgments in this area. For example, New Zealand, Canada and Victoria—I can think of many examples—include in their legislation a short indicative list of practices that are not conversion practices. That list includes support and encouragement in an open-ended way, and gender transition processes. These are indicative lists of practices that these jurisdictions have inserted in their legislation so that they can reassure healthcare providers that they are not captured by the ban.

Lord Hope of Craighead

Does that list apply to parents and teachers in schools or is it tied to healthcare providers in particular?

Professor Trispiotis

It depends. Some jurisdictions have framed this provision more broadly as a list of practices that are not and should not be considered conversion practices. Other countries, such as New Zealand, are more specific about healthcare providers.

Lord Hope of Craighead

From looking at how the Bill before us is worded, would that have a chilling effect across the healthcare sector? Is that right? We have to decide whether to change what is there and that is a factor that we need to consider.

Professor Trispiotis

In my opinion, legitimate healthcare is consistent with the Bill, which would not have a chilling effect on healthcare. As it stands, the Bill would provide insufficient protection for LGBT+ people from conversion practices. That is my position on this.

Lord Hope of Craighead

Really, the aim is specifically to avoid people taking advantage of this who should not be able to because they are not complying with proper practice and are not regulated.

Professor Trispiotis

Exactly, and there would also be no mechanisms of accountability if non-regulated professionals were included in the provision.

Kai O’Doherty

May I add something very briefly on some examples of actual practice that needs to be prevented, which we have come across? People have gone to doctors who have insisted that their asexuality is a medical condition that needs to be fixed. People have gone to counsellors who have said that they need to be turned straight. Parents have taken young people to psychologists to “fix” their gender identity. The definition of conversion practices would cover those cases. Therefore, the exemption for healthcare does not need to be this broad. This idea that healthcare providers would be completely, carte-blanche immune from being accused of conversion practices has really and especially worried trans parts of our communities, because we know that they happen in pseudo-healthcare contexts. So I urge the Committee not to make that protection overly broad and to follow the experts in the memorandum of understanding.

Baroness Browning

For the purposes of this Committee, I have registered that I am a vice-president of the National Autistic Society. Could I bring you back to the thresholds for determining abuse and harm? In the exchange that you, Professor Trispiotis, had with Sir Jeremy, I understood you to be saying that, based on this Bill and other examples, there is nothing that could be described as a non-abusive conversion practice. Is that my understanding?

Professor Trispiotis

That is entirely correct.

Baroness Browning

Is that the same for the other two members of the panel?

Kai O’Doherty

Yes.

Stephen Kiely

Yes.

Baroness Browning

Excellent—I can move on to the other questions, then.

Chair

Before you do, Baroness Brown wants to come in very quickly.

Baroness Brown of Silvertown

Is prayer with a person who is struggling with identity a conversion practice? Where is the line drawn?

Professor Trispiotis

That is a difficult question. It goes without saying that it depends on the context. Prayer that has a specific intention to change someone’s sexual orientation, as defined in the Bill, that is directed to an identifiable person for that specific reason and that reaches the level of harm that the Bill would require for criminal intervention might be captured.

Baroness Brown of Silvertown

I have a problem with what you were saying to Sir Jeremy about what is abusive and non-abusive conversion therapy. I am wondering whether somebody going to a pastor and asking to pray because they are concerned about their sexuality would reach your threshold for conversion practice, because you feel that all conversion practices are abusive in themselves. Can prayer be caught under that? Do you know what I am trying to say?

Professor Trispiotis

I know exactly what you are saying. It would be heavily contextual: it would depend on its intent and its effects. Even if it were captured within the scope of the definition, which is quite broad at the moment, the harm threshold that the current Bill sets is so high that I think criminal intervention would be very unlikely, unless the effect of the prayer that you are describing is as serious as the Bill requires.

Baroness Browning

Given the wording in the draft Bill, do you think the threshold for an abusive conversion practice causing “serious harm…serious alarm or distress” is sufficiently clear? I want to put that into one particular context. The question of children was briefly touched on earlier and the draft content of the Bill has no age restriction at all. If we go above the age of 12—the age of criminal responsibility—where are we in interpreting this wording? The child’s right, particularly under the Equality Act, was mentioned, but we have a much older Act—the Children’s Act. I recently looked at the Government website to check that I was still up to date with this and, today, the Government are telling parents under the Children’s Act 1989 that “Having parental responsibility means you have legal rights and duties relating to your children’s upbringing. If you have parental responsibility, your most important roles are to: provide a home for the child…protect and maintain the child” but “You’re also responsible for: disciplining the child…agreeing to the child’s medical treatment” and “naming the child and agreeing to any change of name”. It has been many years since I was responsible for bringing up a teenage child, so I am probably out of date and, from what I hear, they are much more problematic than they were back in the 1970s. I will leave you to discuss that outside this meeting. However, I have looked at some of the challenges and some of the casework that we have experienced and had sight of, particularly following the Cass report and things like that. How do you balance these definitions of “serious harm”, “serious alarm” and “distress” with a parent bringing up a stroppy teenager—if I can put it that way—who is going to rail against whatever the parent is saying or suggesting, or not wanting or wanting them to do? How, for the context of the Bill, can we in this Committee balance those two rather conflicting situations?

Professor Trispiotis

The definition of the harm threshold adopted by the Bill is tried and tested. It is the coercive control harm threshold, so serious alarm, distress, or serious psychological or physical harm.

Baroness Browning

Could you describe serious distress for me?

Professor Trispiotis

It is in the explanatory notes to the draft Bill.

Baroness Browning

But what does that mean in practice?

Professor Trispiotis

There are specific examples—

Stephen Kiely

Serious distress basically follows the coercive control section of the Serious Crime Act, which has statutory guidance attached. That Act has been in place for 10 years and authorities are well used to assessing cases in that area. It gives really clear examples of repeated and continuous behaviour that is considered controlling and coercive. We are lucky that the Government have decided to align the serious harm thresholds to legal precedents, and they are bodily harm, psychiatric injury and serious distress, which goes to the coercive control section of the Serious Crime Act.

Professor Trispiotis

I have the explanatory notes in front of me because I wanted to give you an accurate answer. Serious distress is not specifically defined, but the effects that would trigger an intervention are described: “a noticeable decline in physical or mental health that lead to self-harm, an inability to work, and an inability to care for oneself”. I understand that this is a list of non-indicative examples.

Baroness Browning

Do you think that that would relate to a 14-year-old teenager?

Professor Trispiotis

It is a difficult question to answer in the abstract, but some members of this Committee were instrumental in passing the coercive control offence almost 10 years ago. I was starting out in my academic career when that offence was passed, so I remember the narrative at that point, which was, “How can you distinguish between a toxic relationship and a coercive or controlling relationship?” That argument was put forward against criminal intervention in this area. That is not dissimilar to what we are discussing today. This is an offence that, like coercive control, involves a pattern of behaviour—and, in many cases, non-physical abuse—but we are not where we were 10 years ago. The CPS has had 10 years of training, and there are many examples from the academic literature. There is also parliamentary work in this space. So criminal justice agencies are becoming better at spotting when these thresholds apply to specific cases because of, in some ways, their experience with the application and implementation of the coercive control offence, which has many things in common with conversion practices.

Chair

I am going to go to Marie Goldman and then move to Baroness Prentis, as we are coming to the close of this session.

Marie Goldman

I draw everybody’s attention to my entry in the register of interests. As the spokesperson on women and equalities for the Liberal Democrats, I have met with Stonewall before, although I do not believe that Stephen and I have met personally before. I want to follow on with this theme and ask just one very specific question about any challenges that you might envisage for victims and survivors seeking to prove the level of harm that they have experienced. Do you see any challenges in the way the Bill is drafted that might make this difficult or easier? Are there any changes that need to be made?

Professor Trispiotis

The 2021 Home Office review of the coercive control offence showed clearly that the fact that you have to prove actual harm is creating significant evidential difficulties. This might be one of the reasons why prosecutions under the coercive control offence are so low. I know that the House of Lords has done significant work in this area over the past year and that a report on the Domestic Abuse Act and its implementation is due to be published. I would be curious to see whether the harm threshold in the control and coercive behaviour offence will be reconsidered. In the meantime, in Scotland and Northern Ireland, the offence of coercive control involves a risk-based offence, so the conduct in a case would have to be seen as very likely to cause serious harm. This is, by the way, the model that Canada followed in its coercive control legislation, which was passed just this year. We need a clear, high threshold in this area of conversion practices and coercive control, not only for all the reasons we have discussed but because we know from the implementation of the coercive control offence in England and Wales that, because of the pattern of behaviour that is involved—as well as, often, the vulnerability of survivors and victims of these practices—having to prove actual harm can be a barrier to access to justice. That is something for Parliament to consider in the next stage of this process. The only point I would make—I will stop here because I have taken up a lot of time—is that changing the criminal threshold to a risk-based offence, as Scotland and Northern Ireland have done with coercive control, does not mean lowering the threshold. It is just a different way of assessing whether or not harm has occurred or is about to occur; that is from the academic literature on the subject.

Chair

Naz has a very quick follow-up question. We will then come on to Baroness Prentis.

Naz Shah

The Serious Crime Act, which you mentioned, does not cover children, so in terms of the affirmation—or refusal of affirmation—by parents to children, they would come under the scope of this Bill, would they not?

Professor Trispiotis

I am sorry, would you mind rephrasing your question?

Naz Shah

The first issue is that the Serious Crime Act, to which you have referred, does not cover children. That is a fact. My question is: given the way the Bill is drafted, if a parent was not affirming a child’s sexual identity, they would fall under the scope of this Bill, would they not?

Professor Trispiotis

Your question is whether a parent who is not affirming of their child’s sexual orientation or gender identity would fall under the scope of the Bill as it stands. Naz Shah indicated assent.

Professor Trispiotis

The Bill as it stands sets a very high threshold. Negative conversations between parents and children in this area would have to produce extremely harmful effects in order to be captured by the criminal threshold.

Naz Shah

But here’s the thing. We have had conversations with the committee that drafted this Bill. It was very clear that we see each victim as the victim presents and that, in some instances, just refusing to affirm a child’s identity could cause huge amounts of alarm and distress, as well as psychological issues. If we take that as fact, by that definition, am I right in thinking that, as much as you are confirming or suggesting to me that it is a high bar, it is not, really? Parents will fall into this Bill.

Professor Trispiotis

It is a very high bar, and it would be heavily contextual. It is very difficult to answer these questions in the abstract. The CPS has such a bar not only for the coercive control offence but also in response to female genital mutilation and forced marriage—again, offences that involve discriminatory abuse, occasionally in a family context, as with this offence. It has treated these cases very carefully, looking at a set of very specific factors, and many of these cases go to complex case units. So I do not envisage what you describe as a paradigmatic example of conversion practices that would be captured by the Bill, as it stands, knowing what we know about the CPS’s treatment of FGM and forced marriage.

Chair

I am going to have to interrupt, Naz, because we need to move on. We are very short on time now.

Baroness Prentis of Banbury

I will be very quick. We have seen protection orders in a few other contexts, such as FGM and domestic abuse. How do you envisage them being used here? Who do you think is going to find them useful?

Kai O’Doherty

As I mentioned, as an anti-abuse charity, Galop is quite familiar with trying to access different kinds of protection order to support the victims and survivors who come to us. Although they are modelled on the forced marriage and FGM protection orders, a similar order to look at is the stalking protection order, which was rolled out in 2020 and had positive requirements as well as potential restrictions. In talking to our independent domestic violence advocates this week, in order to understand more, they made it clear to me that they sometimes find it near impossible to get these protection orders because of huge backlogs with the police. It is even difficult in high-risk stalking cases; I know that has led to a super-complaint by the Suzy Lamplugh Trust to re-investigate these. Overall, in essence, these orders are a really helpful tool that must be part of this Bill, but the key thing is how they are used and implemented. As the Bill is drafted, they would be very helpful, especially if the police then get better at understanding, identifying and doing risk analysis on conversion practices.

Chair

Is that helpful, Baroness Prentis?

Baroness Prentis of Banbury

Anyone else? No? Perhaps I can summarise your evidence, then: in your view, these orders have not worked sufficiently in another context, but you think that they would here.

Kai O’Doherty

They have not worked sufficiently but, where they can be applied, and where forces have the correct training and inform victims of their rights—those are issues across all crime—they are useful tools for advocates.

Professor Trispiotis

I would second that. There is ongoing work on domestic abuse protection orders, which has been commissioned by the Government with local police authorities and academics. You are right that the House of Commons Women and Equalities Committee report on FGM, published in 2025, clearly identified limited uptake of protection orders. Likewise, the Government’s statutory guidance on handling cases of forced marriage, which was published in 2023, also acknowledged that victims are reluctant to seek a protection order, sometimes out of fear of criminalising family members and sometimes out of fear of retaliation. There is a similar story with domestic abuse protection orders. That does not mean that protection orders are not helpful; they are very helpful and valuable and we are glad to see legislation creating protection orders in this context, but it is a matter of ongoing training and support and co-operation between Parliament and criminal justice authorities and academics as well.

Baroness Prentis of Banbury

Who would you view as being the most likely person or body to apply for these protection orders? Who do you think they will be used by?

Professor Trispiotis

It is difficult to answer the question in the abstract. We can draw parallels from FGM and forced marriages, and it has been a combination of victims and parents and local authorities and carers who have applied for those. It is a combination of actors that have benefited from protection orders in those contexts.

Stephen Kiely

I will just add that protection orders are something new—we have not seen them in other jurisdictions, so it is a really welcome addition to this Bill. We also have people who have worked in these areas who have a lot of experience of using protection orders, and it would be really good if the Committee took evidence from different organisations or different groups who have experience of them, so we can learn more.

Naz Shah

On forced marriage orders, I am a victim of forced marriage, so I have lived experience of this. Correct me if I am wrong, but my understanding is—and it is fact—that that primarily targets parents. It is not about adults. You referred twice to abstract issues, but actually they are not very abstract; these are very real situations. That would apply to parents, and in this case, I want to understand whether you agree that it could apply to institutions as well. These protection orders would be not just for parents but, potentially, any institution could apply them to other institutions when it concerns adults. Is that your understanding?

Professor Trispiotis

I mentioned the forced marriage protection orders just with regard to their uptake, because that was the question. I do not think that they are an exact parallel to the protection orders that the Bill introduces. At the moment, as it stands, the scope of protection orders that this legislation has introduced is sufficiently protective.

Naz Shah

They—protection orders—would apply primarily to children. In answer to the first question asked of you, you quoted research about where these conversion practices happened, and you gave percentages: 16% parents and some other percentage in a religious setting, or whatever. To go back to that question, in your expertise, do you view the protection orders in this Bill as being applied primarily to parents or to institutions?

Kai O’Doherty

If I might, I think they primarily will apply to abusers. When we talk about the specific categories, it will depend on who is coming for support. While we know who the disproportionate victims and perpetrators tend to be, it is most important, as you said yourself, that we focus on what is actually happening and the lived experiences of people who need protection. Rather than get too distracted by the totality of parents and the totality being impacted, we must instead think about the minority of parents who we know are abusers in various contexts, and abusers in this context.

Naz Shah

It would apply to parents, and parents are covered by the Children Act in terms of abuse. I just wanted to clarify that—that is an accepted fact.

Professor Trispiotis

The protection orders would apply to parents, yes, as they would apply to any perpetrator of abuse. But, again, the courts—specifically the family court, in this case—have significant expertise in navigating tricky territory like this, and in my experience they would be very reluctant to issue protection orders unless it was absolutely necessary.

Chair

I am going to interrupt and use the Chair’s prerogative to conclude our first panel. On behalf of us all, I thank the three witnesses. I encourage you to follow up on any points that you feel you need to in written correspondence. Examination of Witnesses

Witnesses

Dennis Kavanagh, Helen Joyce and Dermot Kehoe.

Chair

I turn to the second panel in our first evidence session on the draft Conversion Practices Bill. Could the witnesses please introduce themselves?

Dennis Kavanagh

I am one of the directors at Gay Men’s Network.

Helen Joyce

I am a former journalist at the Economist and the author of “Trans: Gender Identity and the New Battle for Women’s Rights”, but I am here today as the director of advocacy for Sex Matters, which is a human rights charity concerned with the human rights that relate to recognising the binary and immutable nature of sex.

Dermot Kehoe

I have been a senior civil servant in the Home Office and the health service, and I have also made some documentary and TV programmes on social affairs and international affairs. In my spare time, I am a local councillor, but I am here today as a voluntary trustee of the Lesbian, Gay and Bisexual Alliance and its vice-chair.

Lord Isaac

This question is specifically for the Lesbian, Gay and Bisexual Alliance and the Gay Men’s Network. In your views, how prevalent are conversion practices in England and Wales and what do they typically entail?

Dermot Kehoe

At the LGB Alliance, we run support services for our members, which includes a network of over 40 friends groups from around the country. We run a helpline for younger LGB people, we maintain a business forum and we hold several national events and conferences around the country. We are the only UK charity that exclusively looks after or seeks to look after the interests of LGB people, and through those services we get our insights. I can tell you that about 30% of the calls that we get to our helpline are from people concerned about being gay and about whether or not they are transgender, if they are facing pressure around that. We got interested in this issue through our friends groups. Our friends groups go from the Isle of Skye down to Cornwall, and every weekend about 1,000 people from different places have pub lunches, go on walks, do book clubs and so on. A couple of years ago, we found that detransitioners started coming to those meetings. They connected to us and saw themselves as gay. This was brought to us by our convenors, who asked how we could deal with it demographically, as some of these people could be quite vulnerable. We commissioned some research into that and we have some qualitative findings, which we will share with the Committee when it is ready following this meeting. We found out the following about some people—not everybody—who thought of themselves as gay and who were persuaded or decided that they were, in fact, transgender. I will give you a case study of a guy called Michael, whom I interviewed at our last conference. Michael is a young man from Scotland, from Glasgow, who is in his early 20s. By his own account, he was dealing with various other issues. He was a gay man, but his friendship network suggested that he might in fact be transgender. He liked painting his nails and wearing high platform heels. He came to the view that he was transgender, he socially and medically transitioned, and lived as a heterosexual woman, as he saw it, for a number of number of years. Also, his parents and family had supported him as a gay man, but they said that they did not think that he was really born in the wrong body. However, they were still there and they obviously tried to maintain a relationship, but it got strained. When he came to the point of having surgery, he came to the realisation, as he would say it, that he was not transgender; he was a gay man. He now lives as a happy gay man. There are two insights in that for us: the first is that he is a gay man. He still paints his nails and wears high-heeled platform shoes, and he is no less of a man than he was before that. Secondly, he reconnected with his family and said, “Actually, it was my parents and my family who stood by me through this process. They were looking after my interests all along.” Now, that is his story. It is not, by any means, everybody’s story, but it is a story that we are increasingly seeing, and our research is suggesting that. I think we have some insight into that, Lord Isaac, and it is a particular concern with this legislation as currently drafted. I cannot give you a national picture, but we are concerned about that form of practice.

Lord Isaac

Before I turn to the Gay Men’s Network, can you identify what, in that situation, you think was a conversion practice?

Dermot Kehoe

In that situation and the particular case study I gave you, I do not think we need to bring the criminal law to bear. These issues are complex and sensitive. We probably need a bit more support, care and space for people. We need to be mindful of these issues all the time. I will come back to it, but someone spoke earlier about how sexual orientation and gender identity are different things. Young people in particular are navigating some quite complex and sensitive issues over time. They need to be supported to do that. There are obviously boundaries around that and things that are unacceptable. However, I am concerned that, as I read the Bill currently, if a parent said to their child, “I do not believe that you were born in the wrong body and are a heterosexual woman, but I do believe that you are my gay son and I support you in that,” that would be trying to deny their gender identity. It would axiomatically be a conversion practice, although maybe not an abusive one. That is my concern.

Lord Isaac

We will certainly come to that; my colleagues will cover it very shortly. I come to the Gay Men’s Network. What, in your view, are the prevalence rates? Can you also tell us what the conversion practices amount to? Can you give us any evidence about your experiences of what typical conversion practices consist of?

Dennis Kavanagh

Yes, certainly. We are here today from Gay Men’s Network because we are concerned that the Bill embeds and entrenches a form of gay conversion therapy that has been going on for years. It is the gay conversion therapy that has been going on in gender medicine. In the 2012 patient survey at the Tavistock, 80% of girls and 90% of boys were attracted to the same sex. There is no earthly reason at all for that figure to be so high. I might add that 35% were autistic, compared with 2% in the population. There is something wrong with that and no one seems very interested in it. Homophobia has been repeatedly raised as a safeguarding concern at GIDS. The former head of safeguarding, Sonia Appleby, raised it; Dr David Bell raised it; and Marcus and Sue Evans raised it. When Dr Natasha Prescott left GIDS, she said in her exit interview that “there is increasing concern that gender affirmative therapy…is reparative therapy against gay individuals, i.e. by making them straight”. Dr Matt Bristow said to Hannah Barnes that GIDS was performing “conversion therapy for gay kids”. So there are statistics and reports from medics on the ground. In 2022, Baroness Cass, in her interim report, said that she had spoken to “young lesbians who felt pressured to identify as transgender”. Now, as Dermot said, we do not say that that is the experience of every child—of course not—but we do say that there is a problem here. Gay children or teenagers are disproportionately coming to the conclusion that they are in the wrong body. We suggest that that is the actual gay conversion therapy that is going on, on the ground, and, as Dermot pointed out, this Bill makes it worse. It makes it a crime to say to your teenage daughter, “I want you to love your body. I want you to grow up to be a happy lesbian. I don’t believe you are a man.” That would risk being emotional pressure, as the mother in that example is saying “I love” to the daughter. That is our opinion on the prevalence of gay conversion therapy. I am so sorry, Lord Isaac; you had a second question.

Lord Isaac

It was really about what those conversion practices typically entail. You very much focused on the conversion practices in a therapeutic context, but that really answers my question. Thank you.

Baroness Browning

Could I just thank Dennis for raising the autism cases? I have declared that I am a vice-president of the National Autistic Society. Autistic teenagers would, of course, be caught by this legislation. What would you suggest for the youngsters who do need some sort of therapy or consultation? The majority of autistic teenagers, certainly those with an IQ of over 70—and many of them have quite high IQs—automatically feel that they are different from everybody else. That feeling of difference has to be very carefully nurtured and explained to them, over a long period of time. Do you have any suggestions on whether autistic youngsters should be subject to advice from particular groups of people and not just the general counselling that other teenagers might have?

Dennis Kavanagh

I should say that I lack your expertise in this area. I noted the figures. I suppose the one thing I could say is that they absolutely do not need a situation in which people are treading on eggshells, scared to deal with them in a way that is appropriate to how they see the world, because they are in fear of prosecution. That is about as much as I should say, as I defer to autism experts such as you on that.

Dermot Kehoe

I might add to this not as an expert but because my younger brother is severely autistic. He has quite a literal view of the world. As I think I arrived at earlier, we need to tread quite carefully with these issues. Issues of identity formation are particularly difficult, particularly for autistic people, just as they are with my brother.

Chair

I will move on to Baroness Brown, because there are lots more areas we need to cover, and will bring in the rest of the panel, as well.

Baroness Brown of Silvertown

You were all present during the previous session, so I am going to ask simply what concerns you have that the Bill could cause a chilling effect on legitimate medical professionals. I would be grateful for views from all three of you on this.

Helen Joyce

Sex Matters recently did research in which we spoke to 30 experienced and trained—well, a couple were trainees—therapists of various sorts, including some whistleblowers from the Tavistock. I think there were five foreign case studies and 25 local people, and every one of them said that there would be a serious chilling effect. Many of them said that they already did not work with people who were gender distressed or were teenagers, among whom identity issues come up so much, because they had been treading on eggshells. They pointed out that the healthcare carve-out, as it is written, covers only things that happen in healthcare, so it cannot cover training, supervision, work with the parents or what the parents say and do. So a therapist might be protected in saying something, but the parent is not protected in saying that. They pointed out that, when you are doing ordinary, evidence-based, ethical care of any sort, you have to be very open. You have to explore all sorts of issues and help the person to understand themselves. You are not imposing anything. But one thing you do not do is to just take the first explanation that they give when they come into the room. You never do that in therapy. One of them said, “You’re not buying rent-a-friend.” You need to have conversations in which people say things like, “Why do you think you are trans? Why do you think you are gay? What does that mean to you?” You might not say that if you are afraid that, afterwards, it could be interpreted as being a conversion practice. Then we come to the question of the healthcare carve-out; however, all the regulatory bodies and so on are signed up to an affirmative model that does that thing of saying “What you say is what you are”, in this one field alone. There is nothing else that therapists would treat as if saying, “We can’t touch that. We just have to accept what you say.”

Dermot Kehoe

To reflect on the previous session as well, I say unequivocally that we absolutely oppose and abhor the conversion practices that were described in that session. None of us in the LGB Alliance or, I am sure, on the panel would in any way want to be seen not to do that. They are absolutely wrong.

Baroness Brown of Silvertown

That is really helpful. Thank you for saying that.

Dermot Kehoe

Absolutely; I have been around long enough. On the chilling effect, you asked about the conviction or prosecution rates. From a policy perspective, I am not a lawyer, but the correct metric for a law is not how many prosecutions there are. If you ban handguns, you are not successful if there are lots of prosecutions; it is about a change of behaviour. As I understand it, that is the point of most laws, and this will change behaviour. If I may use a perhaps counterintuitive example, I first got involved in LGB activism a long time ago, when I came out of college, on clause 28. I was in Manchester at the time, and I went to the big demonstration in the city centre, with Ian McKellen. It was a formative part of my life. We made the arguments about the mission creep of that. Anyway, we failed, and it became section 28. As far as I know, there was not a single prosecution under section 28, yet it had a chilling and a dampening effect on a generation of lesbians and gay and bisexual men. It is not just about the prosecution rate; it is about the behaviour underneath. That is what concerns us about this.

Baroness Brown of Silvertown

That is what the international examples said to us, too. They did not have prosecutions, but they left the field. Given that we are agreeing collectively, I think, that there is such a thing as conversion practice that is outside of the medical arena, which was attested to in our first session, and that this can be undertaken by those who profess to be counsellors and psychologists but are within settings that are not regulated and the persons themselves do not belong to a body that is regulated, are there changes we could make to this Bill around the medical side in clause 3 which would meet your concerns but also allow us to take action against quasi-counsellors and individuals who want to embark on conversion therapy that involves getting rid of demons and dragging people around churches, etc.?

Dennis Kavanagh

If I may come in on that, those things would already be criminal offences. Just about everything you heard from the last few witnesses, and I echo what Dermot said about them, are already criminal offences. If you drag someone into a church and exorcise the demons, you have section 4A of the Public Order Act, you probably have common assault and you may have false imprisonment or ABH. We are not short of criminal offences in this country. The danger is if you try—

Baroness Brown of Silvertown

If I may just push in on this, when issues like this came up when I was a local MP, the police did not feel that there was action that they could take, so perhaps we could accept that legislation that can cope with egregious, harmful or abusive conversion therapy is not there.

Dennis Kavanagh

I would not accept that at all, I am afraid. I fully understand that you have had those conversations with the police, but this could be an area where the police need to look with more care at the offences available to them. For example, under section 1 of the Children and Young Persons Act 1933, we have a very effective offence of child cruelty. About 90% of the examples I hear in this argument would be covered by that offence, which requires, importantly, wilful ill treatment. It requires an intention; this does not. We could amend this Bill here, there and everywhere to carve out this and tweak that, but at the end of the day, the Government would still be passing a Bill that says that there is one area only of medical practice where you could get prosecuted if you put a foot wrong. That will not be a chilling effect; it will be a deep freeze. Anyone in that area with any sense will say, “I am not going anywhere near this.” We have to remember this is not gay marriage 2.0. It is not an equality statute; it is a criminal statute. Subjecting medics and, importantly, parents to that threat is a chilling effect of the most tyrannical kind, in my opinion.

Baroness Brown of Silvertown

Do either of the other members of the panel think that there is a tweak or change to the legislation that might meet their concerns?

Helen Joyce

The issue with the legislation is that there are probably some little gaps—unlike Dennis, I am not a trained criminal barrister; he did not mention that he is, so it is worth pointing that out. For example, you mentioned in the previous panel about being taken abroad to do things that would be unlawful here. One could imagine a one-line amendment to the relevant law to make it a criminal offence abroad, as it is here. This Bill is completely different from that. It is casting as wide a net as it is possible to imagine. The way the law is written, it is extremely easy for a quite ordinary person in a host of ordinary situations to be caught by it: people with parental responsibility, teachers who have to uphold safeguarding, employers who must enforce same-sex rules for single-sex spaces. We have put together a list of examples of people who are nowhere near anything criminal, people who are often upholding their statutory duties, who can get caught by this. The issue is that there are these small patchwork things. Of course, like my co-witnesses on the panel, I do not support abuse, but if there are abuses, we need to look at where exactly they are and create very targeted ways to cover those gaps, and not try to cast a net that could potentially catch almost anyone in this country.

Dermot Kehoe

Obviously, we are not all the same on this and I would probably take a slightly more nuanced view. I welcome the Government’s attempt to point this out and send a signal; that is really worth doing. As I say, they may not be able to solve exactly how you do that, but it is worthwhile for Parliament and the Government to make that clear. But the road to bad laws is paved with good intentions, and good intentions are not enough. We need to be very careful to make sure that we send the signal but, in doing so, do not make the situation worse.

Olivia Bailey

To take a belt-and-braces approach, I again draw everyone’s attention to my previously declared interest in the register. When I was the Minister, I met with Dermot and with Helen’s colleagues. Similarly, regarding the previous panel, in my new capacity as Chair of the Women and Equalities Committee, I have met with Stonewall and Galop. I will briefly go back to a couple of points. First, it is useful to hear, and I thank you, Dermot, for saying it, that you condemn the abusive practices, following Lord Isaac’s first question about prevalence. Can I check, then, that you accept that abusive forms of conversion practices are happening in the country right now?

Dermot Kehoe

Gay people have faced homophobia, discrimination, oppression and abuse for as long as I have been alive. Absolutely. There are laws already for that but, yes, I do accept that these things happen.

Olivia Bailey

Great, thank you so much. It is also really useful to hear you say there that you welcome the Government’s signal and intent to try to prevent these practices. I appreciate that it is not your job to do the legislation part, but—just to check my understanding—do you also accept that some legislation or action is required to address those abusive practices?

Dermot Kehoe

It is a step too far to say “required”. I am not skilled enough to say whether it is required or not. I certainly welcome the Government’s focus and attention on it, and the range of things that a Government can do, one of which would be a criminal statute, but I am not saying that that is necessarily required.

Olivia Bailey

Thank you, I was just seeking that clarification. Dennis, can I ask for clarification from you as well? You said earlier that you feared that the Bill would criminalise a parent for saying that a child should love their body. Could you point me to which parts of the legislation you think would criminalise that? I am struggling to align the evidence that we heard from the previous panel about the very high thresholds in this legislation which would mean that you need to have a change act, an abusive act or an act to cause serious detrimental effect. I cannot quite align that with the example that you gave.

Dennis Kavanagh

Sure, I am happy to. The Bill creates a really unusual criminal offence. It does not require that you intend any harm. You only have to intend to change. That is really different. Most criminal offences require that you want to hurt someone or that you are reckless enough to hurt. This Bill does not say that. If a mother says, “I want you to love your body,” she is intending the change, so that is ticked. The Bill then says that the behaviour has to be abusive. If we look at the definition of abuse, it is taken directly—and inappropriately, in my view—from the “controlling and coercive” statute, which was built on equal power relationships between adults. In the Bill, words can be abusive. So, there are the words that the mother has used; we can tick that as well. We then have a question for the jury: is what the mother said abusive? Well, is it? The Bill contains no definition of abuse at all. That is a very big problem, because there is no definition at all of the word “abusive” in criminal law. To date, the Court of Appeal Criminal Division has not pronounced on it. That means that the mother is at risk, with the wrong charging decision, of someone saying that that is abusive. All it takes, frankly, is one difficult and distressing family argument. We have all grown up in families and know that sometimes arguments are distressing. It could take just one incident where that comes to a head and the child is caused serious distress. Frankly, who has raised a teenager without serious distress? So you can see that, because of the absence of an intent to harm and because “abusive” is not defined, that mother is wide open to the risk of prosecution. The Bill fundamentally violates the principle of legal certainty, which could lead, frankly, to arbitrary enforcement, unpredictable case law and general public confusion.

Helen Joyce

May I flesh out that example? Let us make it very concrete and use the example of an autistic child. Imagine an 11-year-old autistic child who identifies as non-binary. Like so many children with autism, she is a very black-and-white thinker and thinks that that really means that she is neither male nor female. That is on the face of this Bill. It is urgent for the mother to say—it is not just something that she might want to say but something that she must say to fulfil her parental duties—that this girl is still a girl. She is female. She is going to enter female puberty. She is going to start menstruating. She is going to develop breasts. That girl may find that very distressing if she is in flight from her femininity or femaleness; if she is somebody who just does not understand that her declaration, her words, do not make reality. This might lead to a fight. It might lead to the child school-refusing. It might lead to anxiety. The mother has absolutely tried to change her if she says certain sorts of things in this conversation. She might say something like, “Whatever you identify as, you are still a girl and you always will be. You are going to grow up to be a woman. What you say does not change what you are.” All of that is factually correct. It is what the Equality Act says about the meanings of sex and gender reassignment. It is the mother’s duty, in preventing this child from serious harm, to say all these things, yet it gets her into the funnel that this Bill imagines, which starts with, “Is it an intent to change?” and goes on to, “Is it abusive?” Well, the child might experience it that way. You sometimes do things that are really not ideal as a parent. The mother might, for example, try to make the child not look at certain websites or talk to certain friends if she thinks they are a bad influence. Then there is the harm if that child becomes anxious or refuses school. This is not an unusual example: we hear about these examples. We pulled together examples for a briefing from Sex Matters that we published on Monday, which I can of course supply to the Committee. Some of them were directly told to us by parents and professionals and some were examples that therapists passed on to us, which they heard in their practice from parents. The important thing to remember is that the Bill makes no distinction whatever between adults and children. The words “adult”, “child”, “parent” and “family” do not appear in it. It is simply inappropriate to say that the way in which you act towards a child, which might be to enforce a family rule or to take them away from bad influences, can be compared with coercive control. If my husband takes my phone away from me because he does not want me contacting people, that is coercive control. If I do that to my child, that may be responsible parenting.

Olivia Bailey

Thank you, that is really helpful. We have established that there are forms of abusive conversion practice that do happen and that we abhor. Do you accept that there will be some circumstances, as we heard earlier, of parents who are abusing their children?

Helen Joyce

Absolutely. We recognise that there are abusive parents and we have laws for that. It is tragic and it is rare, but, my goodness, yes, it happens, and the law must of course step in. The issue is the disproportion between the size of that problem—we already have some tools; unlike Dennis, I am not a criminal barrister—and the enormously wide net in which this could potentially catch not just things that are all right but things that are necessary.

Olivia Bailey

Sorry, Chair; I am taking up too much time. You all broadly covered this earlier on, so let me see if you want to add anything further to it. Helen, you said you think there are some small gaps in the law, and you made a point about disproportion. Thank you for sharing that view. Where are there gaps that you think a law could fill? Why do you think that you would argue that this legislation is not necessary, when we have heard evidence from the previous panel that these problems are still happening, that you need a definition in law in order to deal with them, and that you do need to fill these gaps? How would you respond to that?

Helen Joyce

We just heard, on this panel, that the police did not think that they could use the laws that were to hand. It seems to me that there may be a problem with the police not understanding the laws that they already can use. So, if we introduce a new law and the police just do not understand that either, we still do not solve the problem. On the example that was given of somebody being dragged along the floor of a church, I am not a lawyer but that is obviously assault. If somebody went to a police officer and said that that happened and the police officer said, “I don’t think so,” that would be wrong. Do you see what I mean? It is about using the laws that we have to hand and then, ideally, some really good research to find where the gaps are. Then it is perhaps about looking at targeted things and amendments. I am not a lawyer, but I could imagine that there would be some things. The lawyer is sitting next to me.

Dennis Kavanagh

To make a very quick suggestion on that, the child cruelty offence I mentioned earlier has always had a gap in it: if you cause or procure child cruelty, it has to be in the United Kingdom. Parliament could pass a one-line amendment tomorrow saying, “If you make an arrangement outside of the UK, that should be caught.” My argument would be that it would be better to look at the laws that we already have—child cruelty has worked very well indeed as an offence since the 1930s—and to use them rather than reinvent the wheel and cast the net of criminal liability so widely that you end up catching parents who are having really difficult and really distressing conversations with their own kids. So, where there are gaps, I would suggest targeted responses to existing legislation.

Dermot Kehoe

From my point of view, some of the stuff about the international, and protecting children being taken abroad for these sorts of practices, strikes me as really valuable. Not all the other countries in the world have our standards, so that is really useful. I will come back to this, but there is a concern about the definitions between gender identity and sexual orientation, and it completely ignores a form of abuse. These are different things.

Chair

That is literally where we are about to go, so I turn to Sir Jeremy now to talk about definitions and characteristics, and then, after that, it will be Baroness Prentis and then Naz Shah to talk about definitions of conversion practices.

Sir Jeremy Wright

We have talked quite a bit about definitions, actually, so I can probably short circuit this a bit, but can I ask a question about intention? I would be interested in all your views, but I suspect particularly Dennis’s view, on this. The response that you give is to say that the problem with this Bill is that intention applies only to the conversion practice; it does not apply to the abusiveness of it and it does not apply to the damage it might cause. The response we have had from others—because, as you might expect, we have asked this question—is, “Ah, but the problem is that many people who are committing abusive conversion practices believe they’re doing good, not harm. So they don’t have intent to harm, and they don’t even have intent to abuse.” What is your response to that? I appreciate your concerns about the breadth of this legislation. What would be your suggestion for how we might deal with that concern?

Dennis Kavanagh

This is a really difficult concern because in theory, under the Bill—because you do not require any sort of malicious intent, tortious intent or anything like that—you could, as a parent, be 100% motivated by welfare and still trigger the Bill if you satisfied “abusive” later on. There is a particular problem with the word “abusive” in the context of the gender debate, and it is this: that word means different things to different people. Some people say that, if you do not use the pronouns that someone asks for, that in and of itself is rude and abusive. Other people say that, actually, no, you have a right under the Equality Act and in fact that is a protected characteristic. So we have a very slippery concept, and we have no intention requirement. I do not see how that formulation can be rescued in a way that does justice, because the offence is dangerously close to a strict liability offence. If you can catch a parent who says, “Honey, I do not believe you were born in the wrong body. I do not want to pay for you to have cross-sex hormones privately,” or whatever, and if that can trigger the criminal offence, we are in a very dangerous situation. I would just add one further point regarding the danger. Because this word “abusive” is not settled in criminal law, I do not know how on earth judges are supposed to direct about it and I do not know how on earth juries are supposed to make a non-political decision. If it comes down to a question about the use of pronouns or something, jurors are normally told, “Leave your political opinions at the door of court.” They cannot do that on this offence. So I would say that this offence is so poorly drafted, is so incoherent and spreads the net of criminal liability so widely that it cannot be rescued. One useful alternative that the Committee might consider is to look at, first, tweaking other Acts like the Children and Young Persons Act—as I have said—and, secondly, to approach this in the same way that you might approach racial aggravation and to have conversion aggravation. If you did that, at least you would require an underlying offence that had a solid and stable intention requirement. You could bolt that on, and that would deal with a lot of the problems we are raising.

Sir Jeremy Wright

Thank you. That is very clear. I am very conscious of time. I am going to ask you a big question and ask for a short answer—I am sorry. Let me ask you about the interaction of the Bill as drafted with the European convention on human rights. There are a number of active rights here that may be triggered by this content. Can I ask each of you for your reflections on what we should think about that interaction?

Helen Joyce

To put that in context, continuing from this point on the question of intent, the Bill is unusual in not having a list of defences in it. It does not have an intent defence. It does not have a defence of reasonableness—that you thought that your actions were reasonable—or a defence that you were acting in the best interests of the other person. It does not have a defence that you were acting to prevent harm being done to the other person. This brings me to answering your question: it does not have a defence that your actions were to fulfil statutory obligations. All those things do appear in other criminal statutes. There are some things that come up in the context of the Equality Act, and the European convention as well, that require people, or at least allow them, to recognise other people’s sex and to act on that. There are two examples: schools—where they have to safeguard and obey the keeping children safe in education law—and workplaces, where in certain situations employees have the right to single-sex spaces. It is not just a right but a duty in those situations to act upon somebody’s sex. Now imagine that you have a child in the school, or you have an employee in the workplace, who does not identify as their sex and who thinks, in the words of Lord Hodge, as it so happened after the For Women Scotland judgment, that they had a right that they did not have—a right to behave and to be treated as the opposite sex—and then they are told they come up hard against a law, a school rule or a workplace regulation that requires other people to treat them as their own sex. They will feel this to be a conversion practice. They will feel it to be abusive. They will probably feel that they have experienced harm. They may never want to go to school or to go into the office. But it is other people’s right to say what they see, and it is other people’s right to have single-sex spaces for privacy reasons and so on. I know that is a rather detailed and specific example, but it is a place where this law butts hard up against other people’s rights: their rights to freedom of belief, to freedom of expression and, in some circumstances, to same-sex spaces—and, more broadly, to enjoy all their other rights, as a worker or at a school.

Dennis Kavanagh

Just on the convention, as quickly as I possibly can, for article 7, you have to be able to understand law. It has to be comprehensible. A mum and dad cannot sit and read this Bill across their kitchen table, when the shadow of criminal law is about to fall, and know whether they are criminals or not. It is extraordinary to have a Bill like that. If a client came to see me and said, “Is this abusive?”, I would have to say, “We’ll have to wait for the statutory guidance,” or whatever. That immediately takes us to article 8. The state is now saying how to parent—only it is not saying what “abusive” means. There is a massive article 8 risk in this case. On articles 9 and 10—the freedom to believe what you want and the freedom to say what you want—you have to watch what you say if you are a parent here. On article 14—discrimination—this Bill discriminates a lot against gender-critical people because, if your teenager comes in and says, “I am non-binary; I want to be called they/them,” you are taking a risk if you say, “I do not believe in that.” That is direct discrimination. I think this Bill is ripe, frankly, for a declaration of incompatibility, and what an embarrassment it would be for the signature centrepiece of human rights legislation to run a risk of incompatibility, particularly on article 8, when the first poor, unfortunate parents—I suspect mothers—are arrested under this Bill.

Dermot Kehoe

In the interest of time, I have nothing to add.

Baroness Prentis of Banbury

You have talked a lot about the definition, or lack thereof, of “abuse”. I want your views specifically—but please do not give them if you feel you have already covered this—on the definition and scope of the phrase “conversion practices”.

Helen Joyce

Sexual orientation has an objective correlate in behaviour. Gender identity is entirely subjective. It is something that you declare, and it is also something in which change is the norm, particularly for children. We know that all the research done internationally before the era of gender affirmation showed that most children who identify as trans cease to do so. So it is already incredibly difficult to say what would be a conversion practice. Somebody could identify temporarily as something. Some people are gender fluid—they change all the time. The interaction of the idea that you are causing somebody to have or not have, or to believe that they have or do not have, something that is transient is quite a standard thing. You already have a big problem there with gender identity in particular.

Dermot Kehoe

On these definitions of the conversion practices to persuade someone that they have or do not have a sexual orientation or gender identity, this ignores the potential conflict and contradiction between those two things. These are not the same thing; they do not move in tandem. If you tell a young lesbian woman that she might be a trans man, you are both changing her sexual orientation and her gender identity, or changing them back again. There is a conflict here. These are difficult and complex issues and I am not trying to prejudge them. There are transgender young people who need help and support. There are gay young people. We cannot leave it up to them to know instantly. You do not wake up on a Tuesday, realise you are a homosexual and that is it forever. It is a process you go through. Identity formation is not a one-off event. There is a contemporary and I would argue—and will provide evidence—growing issue about this confusion between sexuality, which is a characteristic, and identity. For young people, this is really complex and troubling, and we have all seen how we must navigate that carefully. Just ignoring that it exists will not mean that it goes away; it will compound some of that, for reasons I could go into further. That is my problem with that definition.

Dennis Kavanagh

I would echo that. I do not understand why, in this Bill, the sexual orientation definition comes from the Equality Act in a way that is stable and regular and that we know about, but instead of taking the gender reassignment protected characteristic, this Bill—in what looks like a bit of a Trojan horse, frankly—sneaks in an identity concept, tacking on non-binary. I would just ask this question: how is a parent supposed to know where an identity stops and starts? Is a child coming down the stairs one day saying, “Mum and Dad, I am this. Call me this,” enough? Is the parent allowed to say, “I don’t think that is good for you,” or, “I don’t think that’s wise”? Are we going to end up in criminal courts with this taken as a point, with the prosecution coming to court arguing a political position—that identities exist—and the defence popping up and saying, “No, we don’t accept that identities exist”? Suddenly, in the criminal court, we are having a political debate, and then the jury is having a political debate. With identity concepts this broad and this open, some parties have been trying to sneak them into law for years, and that is what is happening here in a criminal statute. I do not understand why one comes from the Equality Act and the other does not. That looks unusual.

Helen Joyce

Could I add that the Equality Act is not a criminal statute? It is about discrimination and protecting people in workplaces, with the provision of goods and services, and so on. We have those nine protected characteristics because they are axes of oppression; they are not things that trigger criminal prosecution anyway. Even if we brought the definitions in from the Equality Act, we must still ask whether these are the basis for the only intent in this law. Most criminal statute has a different sort of intent—to cause harm, and suchlike. The only intent in this one is about the identity, and we are importing that anyway from the equality law.

Baroness Prentis of Banbury

You have all talked about your concerns about the effect of these definitions on family life and on parents. Could you very briefly, because I know that we are short of time, tell us what you think of the effect that this Bill would have in the school context and in a religious pastoral context?

Helen Joyce

We have just had an update to the schools safeguarding guidance, “Keeping Children Safe in Education”. That requires schools as part of their statutory duties, and all teachers therefore, accurately to record the sex of every child and make sure that single-sex spaces are used according to sex. Many children think it is their right to use these spaces and be recorded as the opposite sex of that as how they identify. The fact is now that there will be children in schools who think that it is their right, and experience it as extremely painful, unfortunately—because I would say that they have been misled about what the law is and about what the reality is. Those children are coming hard up against child safeguarding and statutory duties of schools, so we are bound to see conflicts. Some parents will be on one side and some will be on the other—it must be dealt with with great sensitivity, of course with individual children safeguarded. The bottom line is that schools will find themselves with teachers, the school and its governors accused of conversion practices; then they will quickly slide through what are meant to be the two safeguards to prosecution—abusive and harm. Abusive includes controlling or coercive words or behaviour. I am afraid that when people impose a rule that people do not want to obey, you are going to be controlling and coercive. Then you get to harm; serious harm and distress has actually a rather low threshold, which refers to a substantial adverse effect on usual day-to-day activities. I think something like 10% of children are now school refusers, so you can easily see that there will be a lot of such cases. There are millions of children in school, so there will be cases in which what it is about is access to the school toilets.

Dermot Kehoe

On the schools issue, this is not just hypothetical. We know MPs with constituents for whom this is a problem now, with schools supporting social transition and not informing parents and so on, and how that impacts other kids. Again, we will provide case studies about that, but this is a practical problem that I think the guidance is trying to navigate, and I do not think that this approach here goes to it. To pick up on what Olivia said, I think it would be really helpful, because there are conversion practices and they do have to end. The things we heard earlier are not okay, to use Galop’s words. If we focused more clearly on what was not okay, we would probably be able to get much more unanimity around that.

Helen Joyce

You asked about pastoral care—I think you have a very atheist panel sitting in front of you. To speak personally as someone who was brought up Catholic and is the mother of a gay son, when I told my father that my son was gay, my father’s first words were, “Does he have to be?” He loves my son very much, and he very quickly got over it and it was not a problem. But as well as remembering the absolute and genuine existence of real conversion practices that are abusive and should be outlawed, we must remember the much larger context in which people are from different generations and have different viewpoints. People have religious freedom, so I hope that you are going to be talking to people who can speak to that, but we have to be able to navigate these conversations and not have them accidentally caught up in an overly broad statute.

Chair

That is helpful. Very quickly, Lord Isaac, as we have 11 minutes and I am not going to let the Committee overrun.

Lord Isaac

I am very interested to know whether some exclusion in relation to exploratory conversations and reasonableness is something, given the discussion that we have had, you might support.

Helen Joyce

I think the most helpful place that we can start on exclusions is what Minister Bridget Phillipson wrote two weeks ago in the Independent. She said: “I know how important it is to protect people’s right to freedom of expression, religious practice and decisions on how to parent. This draft bill will not impinge on those rights…This is designed to ensure that conversations, including challenging ones between parents and children, or actions such as refusing to accept a child’s identity or use preferred pronouns, are not caught by this legislation”. I am sorry to say that they all are, as it is written. The answer is to direct your amendments at those. To me, that would seem to be that you add safeguards such as defences of reasonableness, intent to harm or recklessness, best interests, acting to prevent harm and acting to fulfil your statutory obligations, and then think about considerations of other people’s rights in terms of speech, belief and single-sex provision. I hope that that is helpful.

Dennis Kavanagh

To briefly come in on that point, if there are any exclusions, they should be very carefully drafted as exclusions that do not even permit the criminal process to start. The worst thing in the world would be to draft in a parental defence, impose a reverse burden on parents and have them have to demonstrate to a court that they are good parents. That would be appalling. It is a difficult area, and any exclusions would have to be very carefully drafted so that we do not drag a bunch of parents through criminal courts.

Helen Joyce

And, by the way, some of them would lose access to their children on the way.

Baroness Browning

What you have just said is the point that I was going to start on. In the previous session we heard that both the CPS and the family courts are much more sophisticated in recent years in determining the nuances particularly of family relationships, but once it gets anywhere near the criminal justice system, break-up of families would be almost irreparable in many cases. I think we have all been very clear about what you have said today, but I ask you to clarify whether you think that the difference between abusive and non-abusive practice is sufficiently clear in the Bill. If not, how do you think we should be looking at that?

Helen Joyce

It is definitely not clear enough. “By reference to all the circumstances” is something that means that a court has to decide, but if you can slide through the funnel of coming into conversion practice, going down through abuse and harm, and shoot out the other end very easily, as I think you can in lots of situations, you know that you are going to be investigated, have your children taken away, charged and wait a year for a hearing. Then they decide that it is “by reference to all the circumstances”—for example, it is the first time that anyone has thought that this parent was acting to stop their child taking illegal street testosterone. Reference to controlling and coercive words and behaviour belongs nowhere near thinking about family life; we control our children on occasion, and we have to coerce them.

Dennis Kavanagh

These words are taken from a statute designed to deal with adult relationships and with equal power relationships. There is a reason that when the control and coercive offence came in it was designed not to clip into children—we said that it was better dealt with by the child cruelty offence. Another way of looking at using controlling and coercive words to a child is to say that you are safeguarding your child, which sometimes involves saying, “No, I don’t want you hanging around with these people,” or, “I don’t want you making these sorts of medical changes to your life.” The list that is in the Bill is completely inappropriate to parent-child relationships. To answer your question, I have no idea what the difference between abusive and non-abusive conversion practice is, because the Bill does not tell me what “abusive” means.

Dermot Kehoe

My concern is that the definition of a non-abusive conversion practice is so open—it is the chilling effect; the clause 28 effect—and actually none of this will get to court. I am not a lawyer, so I cannot do that, but even before you get there, you are putting it into the law. If you say that it is okay to be gay but not to be trans, is that a conversion practice? Under this definition, it is.

Helen Joyce

We will see activist and sometimes vexatious complaints being made. Because there are no easy or obvious stopping points, they will spill out into investigations. Over the past three years, I myself have been accused repeatedly of committing criminal harassment and malicious communications simply for calling a man a man, using he/him words for him and calling him by his male name. It is ongoing. This law will be immediately seized upon by the same people who use other laws in an attempt to silence people like me, and we are going to see those cases coming to court.

Dennis Kavanagh

May I come in on that? Because this law does not have a safeguard, like needing the Attorney General’s consent to prosecute, it is wide open to private prosecution. Whether we like it or not, the reality of the gender debate is that this is a tough area. It can be toxic and unpleasant, and it is well known for lawfare. Leaving this offence open for private prosecution is dangerous, in my opinion. I would add that private prosecutors recover all their funds from the public purse, so this is practically an invitation to some activist groups to go after people and use clause 5’s corporate liability to go after organisations they do not like. If this Bill passes, I would be amazed, frankly, if Helen’s organisation was not in the dock at some point.

Chair

Are you content with that answer, Baroness Browning? Okay. I will cover the final question; we will have to be quick, I am afraid, because we are right up against it. In respect of conversion practice protection orders, particularly from the perspectives of yourselves and Dennis, in order to protect victims and survivors, which is the Bill’s stated intent, do you see any risks in the proposed powers with regard to them?

Dermot Kehoe

Yes. As I said before, the orders to prevent children from being taken abroad strike me as much needed. It is not clear to me, from reading the Bill, what can be covered in a protection order. Could this be used to compel parents to affirm children and so on? Are those the sorts of things you are looking at? Because that happens at the moment, and it happens in other jurisdictions. It is very corrosive. The problem that is not addressed in this Bill, which is a growing problem, is that baking in an affirmation-only approach to gender can conflict with people’s sexual orientation, particularly when they are young. If we do not address that, protection orders could further embed an affirmation-only route. You only go to a gender clinic if you are worried about your gender. There is nowhere for you to go for your sexual orientation; there is no other path. So, as soon as you mention gender, if that cannot be explored or challenged, you are then locking in gender affirmation only, which may not be right. That would be my concern.

Helen Joyce

You are also offering a criminal route to overturn civil statute because it says here that orders “may contain…such prohibitions, restrictions or requirements; and…such other terms…as the court considers appropriate for the purposes of the order”. We are certain to see people applying for orders demanding that a school allows a child to use the wrong-sex toilets and so on. They may not get them, but they will apply. Who knows what will happen? This is just uncertainty.

Dennis Kavanagh

It is important to remember that, every time a criminal allegation is made, section 47 of the Children Act kicks in. This means that the local authority has to conduct an investigation. If this Bill passes, frankly, local authorities will have a lot of difficulties in funding all of that. When the local authority conducts that investigation and meets officers who have dealt with the criminal allegation, one of the things they will have to decide is what orders they are going to seek. I am not clear on where people are going with these orders, and I am really worried about the fact that the draft contains the word “requirements”; it says that the court could order “requirements”. As Dermot says, could that requirement be, “We require you to call your child by a new name,” or, “We require you to take your child to this gender service, which you do not want to do, because the court thinks that it is right”? The only example I ever hear of these orders is, “We need them to stop people going abroad for really terrible, proper conversion stuff.” If that is what they are for, I am all in favour of them—I do not have a problem with that—but the way in which they are drafted is not directed at just that. They are wide open, and they contain powers both for a court to say that you cannot do something and for a court to say that you must do something. It is the “You must do something” bit that worries me.

Chair

I am grateful. That brings us to the end of today’s session. As ever, if you wish to follow up with anything, please do so in written correspondence; we would be very grateful for that. I thank the three of you for coming and joining us today.