What is conversion therapy? 

Conversion therapy is many practices that are aimed to change an individual’s sexual identity or sexual orientation. Conversion therapists use a variety of shaming, emotionally traumatic or physically painful stimuli to make the individual’s associate those feelings with their lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender or queer (LGBTQ) identities. Different practices that are used in conversion therapy are talk therapy and electroshock therapy. They treat being lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender or queer (LGBTQ) as an addiction like drugs or alcohol. Conversion therapy has been dismissed by all mainstream medical centres due to the danger of it.   

Why is Conversion Therapy bad?

Conversion therapy breaks down a person’s self-esteem to the point where many people have said they started hating themselves. The conversion therapists then re-teach the person how to walk, talk, eat, etc. Many studies have proven that conversion therapy is detrimental to the victim's mental health. LGBTQ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender) people who undergo conversion therapy are six times as likely to report high levels of depression.   

What can you do to stop conversion therapy?

One of the biggest ways to stop conversion therapy is to raise awareness about the issue so that government officials find out about the issue and be able to do something. If you know someone who is in conversion therapy, help them out and tell them that they are validated. If you know a church, or any place for that matter, that participates in conversion therapy then protest it or raise awareness to people about how it is unacceptable. 

How will this petition help stop it?

This petition is raising awareness to important government officials, and to our school to try help stop conversion therapy. As well as raising awareness it would also inform people of the dangers of conversion therapy and the reason that this issue should be stopped. 

What do we want to do? 

We would like to change the fact that Conversion therapy is still a legal thing, even though it is harmful and basically a violation of human rights. Article five of the UN Human rights states that no one shall be subject to torture, inhuman or degrading treatment. Conversion therapy breaks this human right by treating LGBTQ as wrong and sinful and fills them with so much self-loathing that they try to be something they are not and often end up with depression. Victims of conversion therapy are 8 times as likely to attempt to commit suicide. Even though conversion therapy is known to be bad to the victim's health many countries all over the world haven't banned it. We hope to raise awareness so that more countries ban conversion therapy and be able to protect many LGBTQ people from the dangers of it. "Our research shows that laws banning conversion therapy could protect tens of thousands of teens from what medical experts say is a harmful and ineffective practice," Christy Mallory, state and local policy director at the Williams Institute and lead author of the study, told NBC News.