WUNRN
October
7, 2011 - While LGBT folks in the
When
Paola Ziritti was 24, her parents sent her to a “forced confinement” clinic in
Quito, the capital of Ecuador, where — unbeknownst to her parents — she
experienced “battering, sexual abuse, deprivation of all kinds, and constant
[ridicule],” according to Anne Vigna in the French magazine Tetu.
It took over a year for Ziritti’s mother to free her from the torture, and
another six months of “real psychological treatment ... to try to recover from
his ‘cure against homosexuality,’” said Ziritti, who was the first woman to
agree to file a complaint against these treatments. Her testimony was crucial
in helping to close the clinic that tortured and humiliated her — and others
like it, said Tatiana Velasquez, from the lesbian organization Taller de
Comunicación Mujer. Activists got the government to close 27 of these
“treatment centers” in August, but there are still 207 clinics of this type,
said Velasquez. “For 10 years we have been aware of 30 cases of lesbians,” she
said. Those are just the escapees, the un-reformed,
so to speak.
In September two lesbians who escaped from two different clinics filed
complaints. The international feminist organization CLADEM urged Ecuadorian
officials to instigate “a serious investigation into these illegal and
degrading practices and the closure of these centers.”
These clinics have also imprisoned gay, bisexual, transgender, and
cross-dressing people, to a lesser extent than lesbians, “probably because they
get to leave the family earlier than girls,” said Velasquez. “The girls have
all told the same thing: They are threatened with rape or raped, handcuffed,
starved and forced to dress like prostitutes.”
Now
human rights activists and Ecuadorian officials seem to be paying closer
attention to the issue.