Going undercover to end conversion therapy

“When you’re from any group that is subject to hatred and discrimination, you spend your life trying to avoid it, but to submit yourself to it is to really face what you’re up against, to face the truth.”

This was a statement that really struck me when I spoke to Patrick Strudwick, an investigative journalist who has several groundbreaking investigations to his name, including on LGBT discrimination, HIV, chemsex, poverty and addiction. 

Patrick faced that hatred and discrimination head on when he went undercover and underwent the very practice he was trying to expose – gay conversion therapy. To prove just how damaging the practice was, he engaged a psychotherapist and a psychiatrist who claimed to be able to cure him from homosexuality. He’s spent the years since fighting for change. 

Even in the early 2000s, the idea that conversion therapy was both legal and happening in the UK was incomprehensible to many. As Patrick told me, “we sort of think of conversion therapy, or certainly we did back then, as very much an American disease”. Because it happened behind closed doors in secret, people didn’t know how widespread the practice was, nor the harm it caused. 

“What this movement represented was a really fundamental threat to LGBT people, because it perpetuated the idea that homosexuality is a disease, a sickness, an illness from which you can be cured,” Patrick said.

To crack open the story, he went undercover to a conference for therapists and psychiatrists who wanted to learn how to turn a gay person straight. He had to create a fake identity to undergo background checks and pass through the tight security at the door. Once inside he saw “a young man being treated on a stage with an audience of 100 people … it was quite like an exorcism.”

With a dictaphone taped to his stomach, he then attended a session with Lesley Pilkington, a psychotherapist he had met at the conference. She set about trying to find the “wounds” that she believed led him to homosexuality. She was insistent that sexual abuse had led it him being gay, and even suggested that the abuser might have been a member of his family.

Patrick’s work reminds me of one of my favourite investigative journalists from the 1800s, Nellie Bly. Bly was a female investigative journalist – a rarity for the time – who went undercover as a patient at a New York City mental health asylum in 1887 and exposed the terrible conditions fellow patients had to endure. Her bravery revealed a plethora of abusive practices and led to improvements in how asylums treated people with mental health conditions. 

Journalists sometimes have a reputation as people who’ll do anything to swindle information out of people, but the reality is that there’s a very high bar to meet for going undercover. You need to prove both public interest, and that you wouldn’t be able to get the information through other means.

For Patrick there was no other way to investigate conversion therapy without pretending to seek help from those involved. He calls the treatment a form of “psychological abuse”. “It changed me in the short term,” he told me, “my stress levels and anger levels became out of control and I started having these sort of uncontrollable spasms, neurological events which were investigated by a neurologist. They could find no biological cause, only stress related”. 

After his story came out, the therapist, Pilkington, was struck off for “professional malpractice”, although the psychiatrist who saw Patrick faced no repurcussions at all. 

Broader change was slower to come. Since publishing the exposé, Patrick has been fighting relentlessly to ban conversion therapy. He started off as a lone voice. “Those first three years were unbelievably lonely. The only organisation that really kind of gave me any support was the National Secular Society, and that was just the old phone call here and there.”

Still, Patrick put the issue on the map and in 2018 Theresa May announced that she was going to ban conversion therapy. Patrick said the announcement “knocked me off my chair”.

The six years since have been “carnage”. Legislation to ban conversion therapy has been derailed by MPs who don’t want to ban the practice when it comes to trans people.  

Patrick’s in touch with the Labour front bench – who are likely to be in government come July. This Monday, Keir Starmer announced that the Labour party would introduce a full ban on conversion therapy – including for trans people – if his party wins the election. If they stay true to their word, Patrick’s grit over the last decade and a half will have been worth it. 

“First of all, I would like to note how important it is to fight against the injustice and lawlessness we might meet in our lives. Only this way will we be able to make the world better. The most effective way for me was to go public and attract attention to this problem.

I became a victim of an improperly created system, the UK government’s seasonal worker visa programme. I went through severe difficulties and I was only just surviving, due to the unbearable living conditions provided by my employer.

After we spoke in Parliament, serious changes were announced. They are still in the process of being realised.

~ Lucy here: the Lord’s committee published a report that included a heap of recommendations, including splitting up labour inspectors from immigration enforcement and more money for the Gangmasters and Labour Abuse Authority, the regulator for this area. You can read more here ~ 

I’m glad that we started this process. It helped to reveal some of the issues concerning the seasonal worker programme, through which thousands of people come to the UK each year. I hope they won't face the difficulties I had.”

That’s all friendly readers! For anyone new – welcome! I’m covering topics from all corners of the world so if you hear of amazing stories that have sparked change, near or far, I would love to chat and hear about it. 

I hope you have a lovely week and, for those in the UK, enjoy the rarity of sunshine!