by Dennis Noel Kavanagh
In a less than challenging interview in the Guardian on 28th March 2025, Stonewall’s new CEO, Simon Blake, made a pitch for a “reset” in how the embattled charity is perceived and chose as his vehicle the forthcoming Government ban on “conversion practices”. He relied on a series of a statistics said to support such a ban including a striking claim that 12% of those surveyed had “experienced “corrective rape” or sexual assault, all in an attempt to change their sexuality or gender identity”. The basis for these statistics has not been published, and the sample group is apparently composed of “LGBTQ+ Britons” with all the attendant problems that brings in terms of cohort specificity.
Strikingly, the report continued, (emphasis added), “While some of these are already illegal, campaigners hope that drawing them together under a blanket ban on conversion practices would strengthen recourse for victims as well as acting as a deterrent.” Any criminal lawyer reading that sentence would immediately be concerned, I certainly was. The reason for that concern is “drawing them together” implies that a criminal act can at once be the offence of rape and also Stonewall’s new offence of a conversion practice. For reasons I will outline below, duplicating criminal liability in the case of rape could have disastrous consequences.
