Conversion therapy has been defined as “an attempt to change a person’s sexual orientation or to change them to or from being transgender”. Conversion therapy can cause severe impacts on those affected, including negative mental health outcomes, homelessness and isolation.

In October 2021, the Government Equalities Office (GEO) released a public consultation on proposals to ban conversion therapy, which closed in February 2022. The consultation sought views on a package of proposed measures that would apply to England and Wales.

Our approach to analysing the responses included both manual and guided machine-learning textual analysis. This method allowed us to combine our understanding of the subject and analytical expertise with Natural Language Processing tools developed in-house by Alma’s Tech team to analyse large amounts of text, ensuring every view was represented in the final report.