Before the Disaster: How Conversion Practices Manufacture Vulnerability

Over the past few weeks, I’ve found myself seeing more and more about conversion practices in my social media feeds. News updates, commentary, legal debates, fragments of people’s lived experiences. Much of it linked to the recent Supreme Court case in the United States, where questions about bans on conversion practices have been pulled back into public debate. It’s one of those moments where something that is often treated as marginal or resolved suddenly becomes visible again. Not necessarily new, but newly amplified, and it got me thinking. Not only about conversion practices themselves, but about where they sit in the systems we work in. Because most of what I was seeing focused on rights, legality, and individual harm. All of which matter, but very little of it connected to the spaces I spend most of my time in, humanitarian response, disaster risk reduction, development practice. Which raises a different kind of question, what does conversion practice have to do with humanitarian and development work?

At first glance, not much. It is often framed as something private, cultural, or confined to specific sectors like health or religion. It is not something that appears in risk assessments, needs analyses, or emergency response frameworks. But that absence is precisely the issue. Because vulnerability does not begin in the disaster. It is built over time. It is shaped through relationships, institutions, and the norms that determine who belongs, who is protected, and who is pushed to the margins. When you start to look at conversion practices through that lens, the connection becomes harder to ignore.

We often talk about vulnerability as if it arrives with the disaster. A cyclone hits. Conflict escalates. Floodwaters rise. And suddenly, certain groups are described as “more vulnerable”. The language suggests immediacy, as though risk appears in the same moment as the hazard. But vulnerability does not begin there. It is built over time. It is shaped through relationships, institutions, and the norms that determine who belongs, who is protected, and who is pushed to the margins.

For people with diverse sexual orientations, gender identities, expressions and sex characteristics (SOGIESC), one of the least examined contributors to this pre-existing vulnerability is the persistence of conversion practices. These practices are often framed as private matters. Cultural. Religious. Familial. Sometimes even as care. They are not peripheral. They are part of the infrastructure through which exclusion is produced.

Conversion practices, sometimes described as efforts to change or suppress sexual orientation or gender identity, are not confined to formal therapeutic settings. They exist across a spectrum. In counselling rooms, in religious spaces, in family homes. They can take the form of structured interventions, or something quieter. Repeated conversations. Pressure. Conditional acceptance. Silence enforced over time. What links these forms is not their method, but their underlying logic. That certain identities are undesirable. That they can, and should, be corrected.

The impacts are often discussed in terms of individual harm. Mental health outcomes. Trauma. Distress. These are real, and well documented. But stopping there limits the analysis. Because conversion practices do not only affect individuals. They reorganise the environments in which people live. They reshape relationships. They determine who is safe within a household and who is not. They influence whether someone can rely on family in times of crisis, or whether those same structures become sites of control or exclusion. They shape access to community networks, to housing, to education, to work. Over time, they alter the material conditions of survival.

This is where the conversation needs to shift. Vulnerability is not simply something people have, it is something that is produced. Conversion practices are one of the mechanisms through which that production happens. They often begin in the spaces that are assumed to provide care. Families, faith communities, local networks. But when those spaces become conditional or unsafe, the effects ripple outward. A person who cannot safely remain at home may experience housing instability. Someone excluded from community life may lose access to informal support systems. Over time, these disruptions accumulate. By the time a disaster occurs, the conditions for heightened risk are already in place, and yet, these processes are rarely named in humanitarian or development analysis.

Frameworks may recognise that people with diverse SOGIESC face increased risks. Inclusion is often stated as a principle. But there is far less attention to how those risks are produced in the first place. The focus remains on identifying vulnerable groups, rather than examining the systems that create vulnerability. This gap becomes more significant in the current global context, where conversion practices are not simply persisting. They are evolving. To understand this, it is useful to situate conversion practices within a broader set of movements that have emerged across different regions, often described as anti-gender campaigns. These movements do not operate as a single, unified force. Rather, they consist of multiple actors, histories, and political projects that sometimes converge, while remaining distinct (Paternotte & Kuhar, 2018).

What connects them is a shared framing of “gender” as a problem. Within this framing, diverse sexual orientations and gender identities are positioned as threats to social order, to family structures, and to cultural or national integrity. This creates a narrative environment in which interventions to suppress or redirect identity can be justified. Importantly, these movements are not static. They adapt. As legal restrictions on explicit forms of conversion practices emerge in some contexts, practices do not simply disappear. They shift. They move into less regulated spaces. They are reframed in new language. What was once described as “conversion” becomes guidance. Support. Counselling. Protection. The language softens. The underlying logic remains.

At the same time, these dynamics intersect with broader political shifts. Anti-gender narratives increasingly align with discourses around religious freedom, parental rights, and national sovereignty. In this alignment, interventions into identity are positioned not as harm, but as legitimate expressions of care or responsibility. This creates a more complex terrain. Because the same language used in development and humanitarian work, language of care, protection, and wellbeing, is also being mobilised to justify practices that restrict or suppress identity. The effect is not only the continuation of harm, but its partial invisibility.

When practices are embedded in families, communities, and informal systems, and when they are framed as care, they become harder to identify, harder to measure, and harder to challenge. Legal progress does not necessarily translate into lived safety. In some cases, it displaces harm into spaces where it is less visible. This has direct implications for how vulnerability is understood.

If vulnerability is being produced through systems that are adaptive, decentralised, and often legitimised through the language of care, then it cannot be adequately addressed through surface-level inclusion efforts. It requires a deeper interrogation of the environments in which people live. It requires asking different questions, such how vulnerability is created, where risk appears, and how it is structured over time, and which systems provide support, and which systems produce harm.

This also challenges some of the assumptions embedded in current practice. Community-based approaches often assume cohesion and shared interest. Family is frequently treated as a default site of care. Culture is invoked as something to be respected, rather than examined. But these spaces are not neutral. They are shaped by power. And within them, inclusion and exclusion are constantly negotiated. If we do not engage with that, we risk reinforcing the very conditions we are trying to address.

Conversion practices sit at the centre of this tension. They operate across personal, social, and institutional domains. They are rarely visible in formal systems, but their effects are widespread. They shape who is connected, who is resourced, and who is left navigating crisis without support. They are not an isolated issue. They are part of the broader processes through which vulnerability is produced, and they do their work long before any disaster occurs.

The question, then, is not only how we respond to vulnerability when it becomes visible. It is whether we are willing to confront the systems that produce it, even when those systems are embedded in the very spaces we are most reluctant to question.

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United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction. (2015). Sendai framework for disaster risk reduction 2015–2030. UNDRR.

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