Hello and welcome to The Rundown, a podcast from Politics Home.

I'm your host, Alan Tolhurst, and this week we're looking at the plans to finally ban the

controversial practice of conversion therapy, after previous attempts to legislate against it,

have repeatedly hit the buffers. Join me to discuss why campaigners say outlawing it is so needed, why proposals have stalled so far. I'm delighted to say

alongside me is Alicia Kearns, Tory MP and chair of the Foreign Affairs Committee, along with

Amy Roche, interim CEO of Gallup, the anti-LGB abuse charity, as well as Zoe Crowther, my colleague

and junior political reporter here at Politics Home.

So I'm going to start with you.

First of us explain kind of what is conversion therapy, what we mean when we say conversion therapy and why kind of people like your childhood is so damaging and why you want to see it

go outlawed, really.

So so-called conversion therapy is any form of abuse which has the aim of trying to suppress cure or change someone's orientation

or gender identity. It forms a pattern of abuse. It's not a one-offerant. It's an ongoing pattern

of abusive behaviour. And it can include a whole range of different things. It can include things like

physical abuse, emotional abuse, sexual violence, corrective rape, things like that.

So it spans this whole range of different forms of abuse and violence, but with a very

particular purpose, which is to change, suppress or cure someone's orientation or gender identity.

We at Gallup talk about conversion practices because actually I think the term conversion therapy

makes you think about a very specific type of abuse, which is that there is that therapy.

But actually what we know is that it can take many different forms and it looks very different.

And so we tend to use the term conversion practices.

We have done research that has found that one in five LGBT

plus people have experienced conversion practices, and that is even more so for certain members

...