{"chart":{"title":"Conversion therapies banned","subtitle":"Therapies attempting to change a person’s sexual orientation or gender identity included. They can entail counseling, drugging, electric shocks, castrations, or brain surgery.","note":"\"No ban\" does not mean that conversion therapies are legal.","citation":"Velasco (2026)","originalChartUrl":"https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/conversion-therapies-banned","selection":["Ecuador"]},"columns":{"Conversion therapy":{"titleShort":"Conversion therapy","titleLong":"Conversion therapy","descriptionShort":"Whether conversion therapy (practices that try to change a person's sexual orientation or gender identity) is banned, fully or in part, by law, executive order, or court ruling.","descriptionKey":"- This data comes from the LGBTI National Policy Dataset, compiled by Kristopher Velasco at Princeton University. It tracks the adoption, scope, and enforcement of 27 LGBTI-related policies across 195 countries, with annual data starting in 1991.\n- The indicator is coded as follows: **_Banned_** (conversion therapy is banned by law, executive order, or judicial ruling), **_Varies by region_** (bans differ between subnational jurisdictions) and **_Not banned_** (no national ban on conversion therapy).\n- A ban of any scope counts as **_Banned_**: bans that apply to everyone, bans that protect only minors, bans that bind only licensed health professionals (including indirect bans through mental-health laws that prohibit treating homosexuality as an illness), and bans that apply only in one kind of place, such as Ecuador’s ban in rehabilitation centers.\n- The dataset counts policies established by binding legal instruments — statutes, constitutional provisions, decrees and regulations with the force of law, and binding court rulings. Where no law governs a policy, a written rule that does can count too, such as a health-authority guideline, a blood service's donor questionnaire or a religious ruling. Bills, ministerial statements and non-binding declarations are not counted.","descriptionProcessing":"From the original dataset's single-direction proportion (0 = no policy, 1 = fully implemented, intermediate values = partial subnational adoption), we coded countries into three categories: the substantive direction in effect, partial subnational implementation (\"Varies by region\"), or no policy in effect.","shortUnit":"","unit":"","timespan":"1991-2025","type":"Ordinal","owidVariableId":1354591,"shortName":"conversion_therapies","lastUpdated":"2026-07-15","nextUpdate":"2027-07-15","citationShort":"Velasco (2026) – with major processing by Our World in Data","citationLong":"Velasco (2026) – with major processing by Our World in Data. “Conversion therapy – Velasco” [dataset]. Velasco, “LGBTI National Policy Dataset 3.0” [original data].","fullMetadata":"https://api.ourworldindata.org/v1/indicators/1354591.metadata.json"}},"dateDownloaded":"2026-10-31"}