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 Though widely discredited by doctors, conversion therapy is an
attempt to change a person's sexual orientation through various
means such as hypnosis, drugs, acupuncture and even electric shock
therapy.
In China, the therapy is often offered by centers not licensed to
practise medicine, as well as by public hospitals, in the absence of
an outright ban.
"It's not just a commercial scam, but an action that violates
people's rights," said Wang Zhenyu, head of the Public Interest Law
Center on Equal Rights for LGBTI, one of the groups that compiled
the report.
The National Health Commission did not immediately respond to a
request for comment.
Chinese authorities removed homosexuality from its list of diseases
in the Chinese Classification of Mental Disorders, a national
clinical guide, in 2001.
But many gay people still face pressure from their families to
undergo the treatment.
In 2016, a man surnamed Wang, sued a hospital where he had been
locked up for 19 days while receiving therapy in the city of
Zhumadian, the groups said in their report, released late on
Wednesday.
The man said his family had forced him to get the therapy
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In another case in July, a young transgender woman's family
committed her to a hospital against her will in the southern city of
Jingdezhen, the groups said.
A program manager at the other group involved in writing the report,
Beijing Gender, said some centers illegally used electric shock
therapy in their therapy.
An activist named Peng Yanzi went undercover in a conversion therapy
center in 2014 and was forced to undergo electrotherapy. He then
brought the case to court and won.
There are at least 96 centers and hospitals across China that offer
the therapy, the groups said in their report.
They questioned health departments in 25 cities with such centers to
see if any had taken action against them and found no evidence of
any in 17 of them.
Four cities had punished medical institutions between 2017 and 2018
for practicing psychiatry without proper credentials, among them the
capital, Beijing and the southern city of Changsha in Hunan, the
groups said.
(Reporting by Huizhong Wu; Editing by Robert Birsel)
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