The Aversion Project PDF

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1 Jordyn PSY-260 2/14/21 Instructor Garrido The Aversion Project In the 1970s and 1980s, “the South African Defence Force Military Hospital partook in human rights abuses by utilising aversion therapy, hormone therapy, sex change operations and barbiturates on young white homosexual men as a means to 'cure' them from their homosexual 'disease'.” (Jones, 2008). The Aversion Project was created by the South African government during their apartheid state primarily to control procreation of the white population. It also kept people from having interracial relationships. “Heteropatriarchal views of sexuality supported white male power structures, promoted binary ideas of masculinity and femininity, normalised heterosexuality and determined social roles by biological sex.” (Jones, 2008). This also helped to promote the Christian nationalist view that was largely supported in South Africa. Military psychiatrists as well as Christian leaders would admit alleged homosexuals to a psych ward. The victims were subjected to electroshock therapy to change their sexuality and if that did not work, they were forced to undergo a sex change. After several years of failed results, the project was shut down. As a result, soldiers were left “having received only half of the prescribed gender reassignment surgeries.” (Bottomley et al, n.d). Many of the victims were also left with debilitating mental illnesses and some even committed suicide. The patients also faced severe physical symptoms from the harsh treatment, medication, and procedures, they endured. “Neither the ‘patients’ nor their parents had any information relating to their condition,” this led to a lot of unknown (Zyl, 1999).

2 “In 1973, the American Psychiatric Association (APA) removed the diagnosis of ‘homosexuality’ from the second edition of its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM)” (Drescher, 2015). This deems the treatment done by psychiatrists as unethical because they provided treatment for something that wasn’t even an illness. They also violated the APA Code of Ethics 3.04 by performing procedures and delivering treatment that harmed the patients physically and mentally. The people in charge of the experiment did not retain any form of informed consent (3.10) from the victims. They were forced to undergo therapies to change who they were, and the treatment was proven to not work. The Aversion Project brought into question the idea of informed consent, medical information, confidentiality, and treatment. There was no consent given as the patients were forced into treatment. The doctors withheld medical information and records from the patients and their families therefore it is hard to know what exactly happened to the victims. “People’s right to information about themselves should be reflected in having access to their medical records, either on their own demand, or by a duly authorised representative.” (Zyl, 1999). The treatments performed were unethical as they caused harm to the patients. Now there is specific standards targeting each one of these issues with very strict guidelines to keep experiments like this from ever happening again.

3 References American Psychological Association. (2017). Ethical principles of psychologists and code of conduct. American Psychological Association. https://www.apa.org/ethics/code/. Bottomley, S., Lembede, N., & Mills, K. (n.d.) The Aversion Project. http://www.publichealth.uct.ac.za/sites/default/files/image_tool/images/8/The%20Aversion %20Project.pdf Drescher, J. (2015). Out of DSM: Depathologizing Homosexuality. Behavioral Sciences, 5(4), 565–575. doi:10.3390/bs5040565 Jones, T. F. (2008). Averting White Male (Ab)normality: Psychiatric Representations and Treatment of “Homosexuality” in 1960s South Africa. Journal of Southern African Studies, 34(2), 397–410. Zyl, M. V. (1999). The Aversion Project: Human rights abuses of gays and lesbians in the SADF by health workers during the apartheid era. Cape Town: Simply Said and Done....