A/HRC/44/53 for written submissions, in response to which he received 33 contributions from Member States, including national human rights institutions, and 99 from civil society organizations, academics, medical practitioners, faith-based leaders, parliamentarians and individuals. 1 On 5 February 2020, he held a public consultation in Geneva and, on 29 February 2020, he convened a meeting of experts in Cambridge, Massachusetts. 16. Given their import, written submissions will be posted on the webpage of the Independent Expert, 2 with the exception of those for which the authors have requested confidentiality. He is concerned about the lack of information received from certain regions. Given the persuasive evidence that practices of “conversion therapy”, including its most heinous forms, exist in every corner of the world, the Independent Expert is perplexed by the lack of interest of certain States in engaging in a process that was designed to address an issue that deeply damages millions of persons under their jurisdictions. IV. Overview 17. “Conversion therapy” is used as an umbrella term to describe interventions of a wide-ranging nature, all of which are premised on the belief that a person’s sexual orientation and gender identity, including gender expression, can and should be changed or suppressed when they do not fall under what other actors in a given setting and time perceive as the desirable norm, in particular when the person is lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans or gender diverse. Such practices are therefore consistently aimed at effecting a change from non-heterosexual to heterosexual and from trans or gender diverse to cisgender. Depending on the context, the term is used for a multitude of practices and methods, some of which are clandestine and therefore poorly documented. 3 18. During his country visits and other dialogue activities, the Independent Expert heard many testimonies of lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans and gender-diverse persons subjected to those practices. In Mozambique, he heard accounts from persons subjected to exorcisms by churches or traditional healers and to so-called “corrective” rapes arranged by the families of lesbian women, the community, authorities in faith-based organizations or traditional healers. Similarly, in Ukraine, he met with a 16-year-old gay young person who had been sent by his parents to a psychologist for treatment and to a priest to express repentance, forced to cut all contact with his brother and his friends, ousted from the family home, deprived of his livelihood and threatened with violence and death. The young man, exhausted but determined and resilient, had finally decided to make his family believe that he had changed – until such time as he could freely make his own life decisions. 19. The Independent Expert has been particularly struck by the resilience of those persons whom he has met with and by the extent to which their lives were marked by those practices. The attempts to pathologize and erase the identity of individuals, negate their existence as lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans or gender diverse and provoke self-loathing have profound consequences on their physical and psychological integrity and well-being. In recent global studies, many respondents spoke of the profound damage resulting from being subjected to “conversion therapy”, including in a survey with 8,000 respondents from 100 countries, in which a staggering 98 per cent of the 940 persons who reported having undergone those practices testified to having suffered damage. When asked to report the main consequence of the practice, 4.5 per cent of the victims reported suicidal thoughts, and other main forms of consequential damage reported were permanent physical harm (1.8 per 1 2 3 4 Statistical information available at www.ohchr.org/EN/Issues/SexualOrientationGender/Pages/ ReportOnPracticesOfConversion.aspx. Submissions to the Independent Expert are available at www.ohchr.org/EN/Issues/SexualOrientation Gender/Pages/SubmissionsReportPracticesConversion.aspx. Submission by the Global Interfaith Network for People of All Sexes, Sexual Orientation, Gender Identity and Expression.