Prayer ministry, accountability partners and "loving the sinner" talks can all be conversion practices. What they look like and why they count.
The Ones That Did Not Look Like Therapy
When most people picture conversion therapy, they picture something clinical and extreme. A facility, programme with a name, electrodes, maybe, or at minimum a man in an office with a clipboard and a theory.
Very little of what happened in Australian churches looked like that.
It looked like a youth leader who asked if you wanted to stay back after group and pray about something.
It looked like being assigned an accountability partner who you texted every time you had a thought you were supposed to report.
It looked like pastoral counselling that was really just a weekly review of whether you had slipped.
It looked like deliverance ministry, with hands on your shoulders and people praying out whatever they had decided was in you.
It looked like being told that celibacy was your particular calling, offered as though it were a gift rather than a sentence, and then being monitored to make sure you kept to it.
It looked like a prayer chain who knew your business.
It looked like a lot of people being very kind to you while working steadily toward you becoming someone else.
None of this came with paperwork. Nobody handed you a treatment plan. That is exactly why so many survivors spend years assuming conversion practices happened to other people, somewhere else, under harsher conditions than the ones they lived through.
The Words That Kept It Hidden
The language mattered enormously.
You were not gay, you were "struggling with same-sex attraction", which positions your entire self as a temporary problem under management.
You were not being told to deny who you are, you were "walking in obedience".
You were not being pressured, you were being "discipled", or "shepherded", or "held accountable", all of which sound like care and several of which genuinely felt like it at the time.
Then there was the phrasing that let everyone around you believe nothing harmful was occurring. "Love the sinner, hate the sin," or "we just want what is best for you." We are not asking you to change, only to surrender this area to God. That last one is particularly slippery, because it asks for something total while sounding modest.
The vocabulary protected the practice. It protected the people doing it, who could honestly say they had never run a conversion programme. And it stopped you from having words for your own experience. Because every available term framed what was happening as spiritual growth. You cannot report something you have no language for, you can't even complain about it properly to a friend.
Why So Many People Only Recognise It Years Later
In my work, the moment of recognition almost never arrives during. It arrives a decade on, often while someone is reading about something else entirely.
Part of this is the comparison problem. Survivors measure what happened to them against the worst version they can imagine and conclude they do not qualify. Nobody locked me in a room, I went along to those sessions willingly or I was never physically hurt. The bar gets set at the most extreme documented case, and almost nothing clears it, which conveniently leaves nearly everyone disqualified from their own experience.
Part of it is consent, or what looked like consent. Many people asked for the prayer. They volunteered for the accountability partner. They genuinely wanted the attraction gone, because the community had taught them it was the single thing standing between them and belonging. Choosing something under those conditions is not the same as choosing it freely, but it feels like choosing, and that feeling takes years to interrogate.
And part of it is that the harm was slow. There was no single incident to point at, just a long accumulation of small corrections. Slow harm is much harder to name than sudden harm, and it is no less damaging for it.
Where the Law Actually Sits Now
Australian law has moved considerably, and it has moved unevenly. Here is the picture as at October 2026.
In New South Wales, the Conversion Practices Ban Act 2024 commenced on 4 April 2025. It defines conversion practices as practices, treatments or sustained efforts directed at changing or suppressing a person's sexual orientation or gender identity. Delivering a conversion practice that causes substantial mental or physical harm carries a maximum of five years imprisonment. It is also an offence to take someone out of NSW, or to engage someone outside NSW, for the purpose of conversion practices. Alongside the criminal offences, there is a civil complaints scheme run through Anti-Discrimination NSW, which can investigate, attempt conciliation, or refer matters to the Civil and Administrative Tribunal. The Act is written broadly enough to capture informal religious settings, not only clinical ones.
Elsewhere:
Victoria has had the Change or Suppression (Conversion) Practices Prohibition Act since 2021, covering religious and health settings, and widely regarded as the broadest in the country.
ACT legislated in 2020, with criminal offences focused on practices performed on children and people with impaired decision-making.
Queensland was first, in 2020, but its ban applies only to health service settings. Religious settings are not covered, which is a significant gap given that is where most of this occurs.
South Australia passed its Conversion Practices Prohibition Act in 2024, commencing 1 April 2025, closely modelled on the NSW legislation.
Western Australia has committed to reform but has not yet released legislation.
Tasmania has a Conversion Practices Prohibition Bill, released as a consultation draft by the Greens in July 2026 and not yet passed. Submissions closed in August.
Northern Territory has no ban.
This is general information, not legal advice, and the law in this area keeps moving. If you are considering making a complaint or reporting something, get advice specific to your state and your circumstances.
A Note on What the Law Cannot Do
These laws arrived late for most of the people reading this.
If what happened to you occurred in 2008, or 1997, or in a state that still has no ban, the legislation does not reach back. There may be no complaint available to you. That is a genuinely painful thing to sit with.
What the law does offer, even when it offers you nothing practical, is a public statement that this was harmful. For survivors who spent years being told they were ungrateful or rebellious for objecting, there can be something steadying in a parliament agreeing with them, even belatedly. Several people I have worked with described the NSW ban commencing as unexpectedly emotional, not because it changed anything for them, but because it meant they were not making it up.
That is a small thing and also not nothing.
What Recovery Can Look Like
Recovery from conversion practices tends to involve a few threads running at once, none of which resolve neatly.
There is the work of separating your sexuality or gender from the framework that pathologised it, which is slower than simply deciding you no longer believe what they said. The belief goes first. The nervous system takes considerably longer, and often keeps producing shame on cue well after you have intellectually rejected its source.
There is grief, for the years spent trying to become someone else, and sometimes for the relationships and community lost when you stopped trying.
There is anger, which often arrives late and can feel disproportionate because it has been stored up for a decade.
There is the slow business of working out what you actually want, having spent formative years training yourself not to notice.
Good therapeutic support for this does not treat your sexuality or gender as the clinical issue. It treats what was done to you as the clinical issue. That distinction sounds obvious and is not universally applied, so it is a fair thing to ask about before you book with someone.
If You Want Support:
QLife offers free, anonymous LGBTIQ+ peer support and referral by phone and webchat, 3pm to midnight every day. Call 1800 184 527 or chat at qlife.org.au.
Lifeline is available 24 hours a day on 13 11 14 for anyone in crisis.
Religious Trauma and Cults (RTC) holds a registry of practitioners with specific training in religious trauma, spiritual abuse and conversion practices, if you are looking for someone who will not need the context explained from scratch.
If you went through any of this, you are allowed to call it what it was, whether or not it had a name at the time, whether or not anyone involved thought of themselves as doing harm, and whether or not the law where you live has caught up yet. The absence of a label never meant the absence of damage. It only meant you had to carry it without one.
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