• Spain 60% of Spaniards believe that there are more homophobic attacks and see the social alarm justified

France has created a new crime. With the votes of the 142 deputies, the French Parliament yesterday adopted a proposal to outlaw "conversion therapies" that aim

to impose heterosexuality

on lesbian, gay or transsexual people and that, from now on, will be punished with penalties up to 3 years in prison and a fine of 45,000 euros in the event of aggravating circumstances.


These therapies included, for example

, exorcism sessions, electroshock or drug intake

, as well as other types of practices with physical and psychological consequences for those who received them. "These unworthy practices have no place in the Republic. Because being oneself is not a crime. Because

there is nothing to cure

," President

Emmanuel Macron

tweeted .


Laurence Vanceunebrock

, the deputy for the Republic on the Move who has promoted the text together with Bastien Lachaud (from the left-wing party France Insumisa), has sometimes defended the need to create a specific crime because "it would allow real figures to be obtained on these practices and to have knowledge of the importance of this phenomenon".

The concept, "conversion therapies" has its origin in the United States and at a specific time, the 1950s. Although in France there is no research that has allowed us to know the scope of this type of therapy -and there is talk, among circles religious, rather "healing" therapies - the deputies evoked in 2019 (when the text began to take shape) a "hundred recent cases".

In France, the issue of conversion therapies jumped into the debate and grabbed media attention at the end of 2019 with the documentary

Homotherapies: forced conversion

,

inspired by the book

God is Love,

written by two investigative journalists, Timothée de Rauglaudre and Jean -Loup Adéno, who came to adopt the identity of Guillhem,

a young gay Christian with an identity crisis.

Adéno infiltrated a Catholic religious group, which organized a kind of "conversion camps" in which young people, before an assembly, claimed to

feel "ashamed" of their sexuality

, a 'modus operandi' modeled on the groups of anonymous alcoholics.

The reporters discovered links between these French groups and North American organizations like Living Waters or Courage, which function as true branches.

In a testimony collected by BFMTV television last summer, Cyrille de Compiègne, spokesperson for David & Jonathan, a Christian LGBTI association, recounted how, as a teenager, he participated in a workshop on homosexuality, where it was said that it was "a lack of maturity sexual" or "a stage to be wary of".

"They told me to regulate my emotions, even

to play sports or music" to suppress them

.

"The idea is not to normalize homosexuality at all," he added.

For Elisabeth Moreno, Delegate Minister for Equality between women and men, the adoption of the text that makes these therapies illegal will send a "signal" to the victims so that these "barbaric practices" reach a police station and are punished.

In practice, before the creation of this crime, these behaviors were already prosecuted through other existing crimes such as the illegal practice of medicine or harassment.

This 'new' crime already exists in other countries such as Malta or Germany and it is expected that similar legislative proposals will also be approved in the United Kingdom or the Netherlands.




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