MP La République en Marche Laurence Vanceunebrock announced Wednesday the tabling of a bill to ban "conversion therapies", those practices that claim to transform a person's sexual orientation or gender identity.
The text, however, has not yet at this stage "date of inclusion on the agenda of the National Assembly," she said. "The only problem is the calendar" parliamentary, upset by the coronavirus, "but I'm going to put pressure," she says, hoping for a review in early 2021.
Objective: to establish "statistics"
The deputy for Allier had already conducted a fact-finding mission on the subject with her colleague LFI Bastien Lachaud. His bill aims to create a "specific offense to prohibit these practices and provides aggravating factors to take into account the situation of minors, the public who are particularly victims of these 'therapies'".
This will allow complaints and prosecutions on this "very specific subject", and to establish "statistics" which do not exist today in France, she underlines.
Link with religious organizations
Homosexuality, excluded in France since 1992 from the list of psychiatric pathologies, is still considered a disease by the promoters of these conversion "therapies", which cover "a very broad spectrum of often insidious practices", indicated Laurence Vanceunebrock and Bastien Lachaud in December, presenting the conclusions of their parliamentary information mission.
These "therapies" are often backed by religious organizations which hope to convince participants that it is possible to convert to heterosexuality or encourage sexual abstinence. The fact-finding mission had heard "testimony from people who had been victims or witnesses of exorcisms", and had "learned of facts of rape or excision".