LGBTQ groups seek legal ban – EURACTIV.com
LGBTQ groups in Switzerland are concerned that the country could become a hotbed for conversion therapy. This is already banned in France and Germany.
Swiss lawmakers will begin debating a motion calling for a ban on Monday, a year after the government pledged to look into the issue of conversion therapy.
The therapy aims to change sexual orientation to heterosexuality and is mainly carried out in religious institutions.
“In Germany and France, attempts at conversion are already banned, and initiatives to ban them are underway across the European Union,” said Pink Cross, the national umbrella organization for homosexual and bisexual men in Switzerland.
“It is imperative that we prevent Switzerland from becoming a haven for ‘gay healers’.”
Representatives from politics and civil society referred to the establishment of the association Brotherhood of the Way in Zurich after the change in the law in Germany.
The group responding to questions from AFP unresponsive, states on her website that she rejects “any form of conversion treatment” and offers “no form of therapy.”
They are a “community of men who experience conflicts in their sexuality” and “for reasons of our Christian faith we therefore do not want to live our sexuality”.
community pressure
Across Europe, France, Germany, Greece and Malta have banned conversion therapy, and moves are also being considered in the UK, Spain and Belgium.
According to Philippe Gilbert from the Intercantonal Information Center for Questions of Faith, no religious structures use the term “conversion therapy” in Switzerland.
“We hear the term ‘accompaniment’. There is a wide range of practices: prayer groups, the laying on of hands, exorcism in certain cases, but also weekend meetings between men to discover their own masculinity,” he told AFP.
“This does not mean that within certain religious communities or para-church structures there is not also a certain level of violence against people who may be confronted with suggestions or even pressure to change their sexual orientation”.
Treatments like electroshock therapy are not practiced in Switzerland, but LGBTQ groups insist a total ban is needed to send a signal.
Adrian Stiefel, 45, founder of the LGBTQ branch of the Geneva Evangelical Church, stressed the importance of raising awareness in society.
“It’s a problem that’s rooted in particular in religious communities that condemn homosexuality and don’t allow individuals freedom of choice because of community pressure,” he told AFP.
Growing up in an evangelical environment in Geneva, he spent a long time trying to “heal” his sexual orientation through group prayers with pastors and meetings with a “so-called healed” ex-homosexual.
At age 19, he underwent a week-long “therapy” with a psychiatric pastor in the United States that combined “psychotherapy with a form of exorcism.”
I can feel the violence now
Boots said these practices are often “carried out in a very benevolent framework,” making it difficult to see that they are “not normal.”
Isaac de Oliveira, 25, a history student in Lausanne, grew up in rural Valais in southwestern Switzerland and underwent “pastoral care” to “develop into heterosexuality.”
At 18, he began attending a Torrents de Vie seminar, which included weekly meetings of worship and prayer for almost a year.
“I have a brain that has been altered over the years to pursue an ideal that I am not,” he told AFP.
“I now feel the violence that was hidden behind a conditional love.”
Conversion therapy is not solely the prerogative of evangelical circles, although it is regularly highlighted in the media, according to various observers.
The Swiss Evangelical Network speaks out against conversion “therapies”, but considers a legal regulation to be the wrong approach. It emphasizes the right to “sexual self-determination” and the importance of “ecclesiastical and pastoral care” when sexuality “creates an inner conflict”.
“We are touching the very foundations of religious freedom if we want to ban too much,” Stéphane Klopfenstein, pastor and deputy director of the Evangelisches Netzwerk Schweiz, told AFP.