BBC admits it was mistaken on conversion therapy law

by James Kennedy

The BBC admits it made mistaken claims in its reporting on ‘conversion therapy’.

It’s tucked away at the bottom of the updated article, as these things often are. “We added some additional text to the article to clarify…”

In an article titled “What is conversion therapy and when will it be banned?”, the BBC had erroneously said a conversion therapy Bill had already been published. In reality, the Government had announced that it was committed to bringing draft legislation, but still no Bill was in sight.

You might say it’s a minor error. But it’s a bad one for an article that aimed to explain parliamentary process to the public. Whoever wrote that bit was evidently unaware of what was really going on.

I began writing my complaint. And not just about that claim. In fact, there were around a dozen statements in the article that I felt were misleading. Too many, indeed, to include in a standard BBC complaint.

Few news outlets report accurately on proposals for a ‘conversion therapy’ law. It’s unsurprising, perhaps. The activists use deceptive language and the campaign constantly makes misleading claims.

On the other hand, we mustn’t let them off the hook – isn’t it their job to rebut false and confusing statements?

It matters what the BBC says. Many of us instinctively turn to it to get a handle on what is happening in the nation, however sceptical we are.

It took me almost three months to get a reply. The BBC offered the excuse that it was “dealing with a large volume of complaints at the time”.

Let me be fair to the BBC. It has taken the time to address the complaint at length. It has amended the article. Do get in touch with the BBC if you see something wrong with its coverage, because it can make all the difference.

And the last time I complained about an article, the BBC pulled it that same day and told me: “Having reviewed the originally published article, it was clear that it did not fairly reflect the wide range of views that exist around this topic, nor did it provide an appropriate level of challenge or sufficient context for the reader.” It was soon rewritten in a more balanced way.

This time the change is far subtler. The article remains almost exactly the same. But the BBC did give more detail in its response to me. It is fair I share its clarifications.

Change of Government

The article, I said, gives the impression that the Conservatives had dropped transgenderism from the proposed law.

I pointed out that this was Boris Johnson’s position, but not that of his successors. Technically, the Labour Party’s position is pretty much the same as that of Rishi Sunak’s Government.

I felt that wasn’t the impression the BBC was giving. The BBC correctly told me in response that: “there was only one government, elected in 2019, albeit with three different prime ministers. We correctly referred to the previous Conservative government.”

The Cass Report

The BBC’s article mentions the Cass Report, but not by name. It says:

“An NHS-commissioned report which called for a rethink of children's gender identity services in England said that some healthcare professionals already felt under pressure to 'take a purely affirmative approach' to young people who said they wanted to transition.”

I told them this was a significant understatement of Cass’s objections to a new law on conversion therapy. Dr Cass told the Guardian, for instance: "How you legislate that I have absolutely no idea but all I can say is you absolutely have to avoid anything that’s going to frighten people more."

Cass was effectively saying that a conversion therapy law could have the opposite of its intended effect, leading more young people into harm instead of away from it.

The BBC justified itself this way: “we linked to the Cass report so people could read the details for themselves” and “[t]he issues covered in the Cass Review leading up to its setting up had been explored many times in different fora”.

I disagree that putting a link into an article counts as informing people about the truth of a matter, but at least the BBC accepts that Cass is highly relevant and worthy of attention across its coverage.

Research

I complained too about the way the Report gave detail of the supposed prevalence of ‘conversion therapy’ in the UK. I don’t think it unreasonable to pick up journalists on the misleading use of statistics that so characterises this campaign.

Admittedly, the BBC begins by saying: “It's difficult to know exactly how widespread the practice is.” They should have stopped there.

Instead, in their own words, they “summarised the findings of a 302-page government-published report in six sentences”. But oversimplification isn’t the BBC’s only problem here.

The BBC article states: “About 5% of the 108,000 people who responded to the government's UK-wide LGBT Survey in 2018, said they had been offered some form of conversion therapy, while 2% had undergone it.”

But that study gave no definition of ‘conversion therapy’, and it didn’t ask where, when or what people had experienced, or how serious the ‘offer’ was. That means it tells us nothing about what experiences people in the UK have had. Nor does it tell us whether what people experienced was already illegal. Those are very important caveats, recognised in several of the research papers and Government notes on the subject, but not by the BBC.

Are international laws comparable to the UK?

The BBC article asks: “Have other countries banned conversion therapy?” before concluding that: “Approximately 16 countries have introduced a full or partial ban, including Brazil, Canada and Germany.”

Since a ‘ban’ was first under discussion in the UK, the Government has been aware that the vast majority of what campaigners are complaining about is already illegal.

Theresa May’s Government (as it was at the time) spoke of ‘ending conversion therapy’ rather than ‘banning’ it. That language recognised abusive practices as already ‘banned’. Verbal and physical abuse is already illegal. So is medical malpractice. But those facts don’t align with an activist narrative that demands new, broader laws.

No, the reality is that 'conversion therapy', insofar as we mean genuinely abusive practices, is already banned across the western world. So what use is totting up the number of countries that have a word like ‘conversion therapy’ written into law? That figure is pretty much meaningless. It doesn’t make any difference when we’re talking about abuse that is illegal either way.

More than that, you can’t simply put laws from different countries side-by-side and pretend they work in the same way. Laws interact with other laws. They depend on definitions given elsewhere. The court systems work differently. Lawyers interpret the laws in different ways. There is different case law. Some countries have ‘criminal codes’ and others use wider civil schemes and measures. You can’t just compare, unless you really know what you’re doing.

The BBC defended itself: “We did not suggest the law was comparable.  We made clear the differences… We do not believe readers would have been misled.”

I am pleased they acknowledge the impossibility of comparing the laws. But it definitely looks to me like that’s what they’re doing. I struggle to believe readers won't be misled. Talking of a ‘full or partial ban’ is directly from the Stonewall playbook.

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See also: Labour accused of ‘conversion therapy’: will it back off on a new law?