Forced medication and electroshock: ‘abuse rampant in Chinese gay conversion therapy’
Human Rights Watch releases report on ‘treatment’ being administered in mainland public hospitals and private clinics
When Chen Shuoli was sent to a mainland clinic last year to undergo “therapy” to convert him from gay to straight, he was forced to swallow unknown medicine, according to an account he gave Human Rights Watch.
“The nurses always asked me to open my mouth and she would use a stick to check around to make sure I actually swallowed the pills,” Chen, 35, said.
So-called conversion therapy is given to both homosexuals and bisexuals and carried out in public hospitals and private clinics,according to Human Rights Watch.
The group on Wednesday published a report based on the accounts of 17 interviewees, including Chen. None of them used their real names.
Such conversion therapy runs counter to the Mental Health Law adopted in 2013, under which facilities cannot admit individuals who do not suffer from a mental disease. Homosexuality was declassified as a mental disorder in 2001.
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Chen’s ordeal was not the worst of its kind. Zhang Zhikun, a Shenzhen-based transgender person, underwent the process in 2012, and was given electric shocks. “I was asked to sit down on a chair, with my hands both tied to the chair arms with leather strips. Then the nurse and the doctor attached pads to both of my wrists, my stomach and my temples. These pads are connected to a machine through cables,” Zhang was quoted as saying in the report.
My heart was beating so fast. I climbed over the wall. And then I started running like crazy
They put on a gay porn film for her to watch, and minutes later, “they switched on the electric current. They repeated the electroshock about six or seven times during the session”, she said.
A total of five interviewees reported the use of electroshock, Human Rights Watch said.
Boris Dittrich, advocacy director for the group’s lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender rights programme, said the technique was commonly used during such conversion therapy sessions on the mainland, so “people start associating gay sex with pain”.
The mainland has an estimated 70 million members of the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community. A survey of nearly 30,000 LGBT Chinese by the United Nations Development Programme last year found that more than half of them were discriminated against because of their sexual orientation.
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None of the interviewees would have undergone the process were it not for family and social pressure, the report found.
Under guidelines by the National Health and Family Planning Commission, local governments must investigate any practices or incidents occurring in hospitals and clinics that violate the Mental Health Law.
The law stipulates that diagnosis and treatment of mental disorders must comply with diagnostic standards. “Because same sex attraction is not a disorder, the law renders conversion therapy illegal,” the report said.
One interviewee recalled escaping. “There was one evening, I walked very quietly to the yard, so quiet I could hear my own breaths. My heart was beating so fast. I climbed over the wall. And then I started running like crazy.”
