The British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy (BACP) is one of the largest professional therapy organisations in the UK, with around 70,000 members. In recent years, it has rapidly moved to adopt a more activist political stance, with a much stronger focus on Equality, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI) policies. According to the BACP, “Our desire for social justice determines everything we do…” (2023b: 5). Inevitably, the BACP has now turned its reforming zeal towards its key Ethical Framework, which is largely unchanged since 2018. Peter Jenkins, a former member of the BACP committee which oversaw the adoption of the original Ethical Framework, takes stock of the worrying new direction set out in the Draft Ethical Framework (2025a).
The BACP seems to have been in a continual state of organisational crisis for some years now, with frequent, rapid departures of senior staff, for reasons which are largely opaque and unexplained. This revolving management door has been combined with a sharp change of direction for the organisation, from that of a highly corporate therapy association, to that of embracing an overtly political stance informed by black activism and trans ideology (Jenkins, 2024). Critics allege that this marked sea change has been carried out without full discussion by members. It seems to have taken the form of a heavily top-down, authoritarian political culture. This direction of travel is apparently not open to debate or challenge within house journals, such as Therapy Today.
Cultural revolution?
This process of cultural revolution thus requires a revamp of the 2018 Ethical Framework, in order to give it a decidedly more activist tinge. So, in line with trans ideology, out goes the expectation of treating colleagues with respect (Section 56, EF, 2018). Also, out goes the need for evidence-based practice (Section 84, EF, 2018), no longer needed in the bright, new age of listening to ‘experts by lived experience’. The Draft also has a strange new strapline, namely “Working ethically is working within relationships.” All therapy inevitably involves relationships, and all ethics involves evaluating such relationships. It seems little more than vacant tautology to claim, therefore, that “Working ethically is working within relationships.” If taken literally, this statement rather implies that the opposite must also be true, namely that “Working unethically is working outside relationships”, which makes little sense.
The major contentious element of the 2018 EF remains untouched. This is the soggy paraphrase of the Memorandum of Understanding on Conversion Therapy (MOU), which prohibits attempts to change or suppress the sexual orientation and/or gender identity of service users. Gender identity has no clearly defined or agreed meaning in law, and is not a protected characteristic under the Equality Act 2010. It is a subjective perception, known only to an individual, unless disclosed and communicated to others. This section in the EF therefore pays a covert homage to the continuing malign influence of WPATH, the World Professional Association for Transgender Health, and to its main UK vector, the MOU. WPATH has thus inserted its own contaminated central line into the Ethical Framework, the beating operational heart of the BACP, as an ideological pacemaker, or as a miniature bomb with an unknown time-delay fuse.
Legal protection for gender critical views
However, as is presumably well-known to BACP managers and to those who crafted the draft EF, this section on gender identity is just so much ethical bluster. It will doubtless prove to be legally unenforceable against gender critical therapist members of BACP. The latter are not obliged to accept gender identity as a valid belief system, any more than they have to accept a client’s belief in extra-terrestrials, or an interest in trepanning. The EF is silent, however, on the strong legal protection afforded to gender critical therapists by the Equality Act 2010 itself, as amended by the Forstater case at Appeal Court. The BACP does so far seem to be carefully avoiding a head-on clash with its gender critical members. However, there is continuing low-level hostile policing of debate within online therapy forums. These forums are monitored with extreme vigilance by some of the informal gender fascisti within the therapy world, apparently without incurring any adverse sanction so far from BACP for imperilling the rights to free speech held by its gender critical members.
So what is new about the Draft Ethical Framework? It is much shorter, perhaps in deference to some members’ earlier feedback that the 2018 Framework was too long, too complicated and didn’t really tell members what to do. It introduces three new ethical principles, namely anti-oppression, collaboration and compassion. These are hardly ethical principles as such, at least compared with the classic injunction to ‘do no harm’, but this is perhaps a minor point. The first of these ethical concepts, on anti-oppression, is probably essential in order to pay off the debt owed to the BACP’s recent swerve towards EDI, so this particular addition is hardly surprising. Collaboration and compassion, however, are both more interesting and much more problematic.
Collaborative work
The new Draft places a huge emphasis on working more collaboratively with clients, partly to even out the inevitably unequal power dynamics between therapist and client, and partly to improve communication between all parties. However, this new approach does not tally with the evidence of past research into complaints brought by clients, unless these findings have changed unrecognisably in recent years. A BACP audit of breaches of good practice found most related to problems relating to contracting and boundaries. “Most complaints can be reduced to these two basic issues” (O’Dowd, 2017: 50).
Collaboration almost suggests that ethical difficulties can be smoothed out via improved communication between therapist and client. This may be true to some extent, but my own experience of trying to apply ethical principles within my earlier role as a counsellor trainer tells me that ethics is more often about managing conflict between parties. Ethical practice is not just about being nice to people who agree with you, but about trying to maintain essential professional standards: for example by not accepting students onto a course with major, unresolved trauma; of resisting pressure from employers to accept or to pass students who have failed to meet thresholds for competence; and of challenging colleagues who fail to maintain crucial standards of professional practice.
Ethical practice and managing conflict
Ethical practice, in my experience, requires being willing to experience sustained, high levels of interpersonal conflict and pressure from students, employers and colleagues, in order to make or stand by a decision which is often highly inconvenient to others. Collaboration is obviously good where it works, but ethics is essentially about enduring such conflict, in order to reach a potential point of resolution, to my mind. It can be a very lonely experience, where becoming quite unpopular is the necessary price to be paid for doing the job well. It also requires a degree of gumption, a quality not mentioned in previous lists of personal and professional qualities offered by earlier Ethical Frameworks, but perhaps one which should be listed as being essential for effective ethical practice.
Compassion might seem the least problematic of the proposed changes to the Draft. Surely a therapist would have to be completely heartless to question the inclusion of compassion as a concept within ethical practice? But the term compassion has a difficult and rather chequered history. As a concept, it was completely absent from the 2018 Ethical Framework, yet it seems to have been suddenly promoted to the Premier League to take pride of place in the new Draft version. Yet the notion of compassion, perhaps such an obvious shoe-in for healthcare professionals, comes with a great deal of its own awkward baggage. It really translates as ‘kindness’, which brings to mind the injunction ‘Be kind’, the well-known and massively over-used, familiar mantra of trans ideology.
Limitations of kindness
In reality, the justification of ‘being kind’ can clearly be used to legitimate a wide range of ethically questionable actions. In the new over-riding context of EDI, which apparently now drives ‘everything we do’ for BACP, referring to compassion could be used to: justify supporting social transition for children in school, even without parental knowledge; referring children to suspect trans support agencies with poor safeguarding records; or requiring all therapists to comply with using preferred pronouns. Compassion for gender distressed children could justify the current absurd spectacle of therapists claiming to act as trans allies, in breach of our expectation as therapists of maintaining therapeutic neutrality.
Equally, a focus on compassion runs the risk of prioritising affect and emotion within the process of ethical decision-making, at the expense of reason and logic. Instead of Rene Descartes’ dictum, “I think, therefore I am” (Howard, 2000: 129), we now have its post-modern counterpart: “I feel, therefore I act”. If at all accurate, this would represent a lobotomised form of ethical practice, whereby a therapist’s feelings (e.g. of compassion for allegedly victimised client groups) could provide an ethical justification for any number of problematic decisions and behaviours.
U.K. Supreme Court and BACP
In the case of the Supreme Court decision on biological sex, compassion for allegedly anxious communities may well have prompted the BACP’s partisan, and completely unprecedented public statement in support of “trans, non-binary and gender questioning (TNBGQ) people…We aim to be a fully inclusive membership body and charity for all TNBGQ people” (BACP, 2025b). So, do we run the risk of adopting selective and highly targeted compassion here, namely in expressing huge compassion for the plight of TNBGQ people, but with very little compassion for the apparently less deserving, such as gays, lesbians, women and children?
The BACP’s apparent continued reluctance to engage with the Supreme Court’s clarification of the biological nature of sex is quite puzzling. It even puts BACP at odds with its own EDI policy commitment on this issue, namely “We must comply with all UK legislation…As laws change over time, this document will be updated to reflect current legislation” (BACP, 2023:12). Perhaps this EDI policy statement should now be edited to read: “We must comply with all UK legislation (except for those bits we don’t agree with)”?
Examples like these perhaps might suggest that we have here, not so much an Ethical Framework, but an EDI Framework, specially designed for use by therapy activists…
Abandoning the distinction between adults and children?
Yet perhaps the most serious failing of the Draft Ethical Framework can be found in its jettisoning of the foundation principle regarding the crucial distinction between therapy for adults, and therapy for children. This necessary distinction has been developed gradually over time, in careful recognition that children (used here in the legal sense of persons under 18 years) have distinct needs and vulnerabilities. These needs are based on the child’s specific developmental stage, and their process of emotional and physical maturity, together with their level of cognitive functioning. Early pioneers of therapy with children, such as Anna Freud and Melanie Klein, identified other key relevant contextual factors, relating to possible limitations on the child’s self-awareness and capacity for self-referral, and to the potential for involving parents within therapy to some degree (Holder, 2005). This established a broad understanding that therapeutic work with children involves specialist skills, knowledge and training. This stance is widely agreed and currently applied across all therapy modalities.
This evolved agreement was a notable feature of the 2018 Ethical Framework, and also of previous editions. The EF 2018 referred to the necessity for “knowledge and skills about ways of working that are appropriate to the young person’s development” (Section 27b, EF, 2018). This section has been completely removed from the Draft EF. The removal of any reference to the need for specialist skills, knowledge and ways of working with children now marks a clear policy division between BACP and its sister organisation, the United Kingdom Council for Psychotherapy (UKCP). The latter clearly acknowledges that “Due to the complexities relating to working with children and young people, UKCP believes that separate guidance is needed for such clients/patients” (UKCP, 2024).
Queer Theory, gender identity ideology and the MOU
In order to make sense of this senseless revision, it is necessary to go back and look at the Memorandum of Understanding on Conversion Therapy (BACP, 2024). The MOU has been heavily influenced both by Queer Theory, a post-modernist academic movement and by gender identity ideology (Jenkins and Sears, 2024). Gender identity ideology promotes so-called gender affirming care, which consistently over-estimates the child’s ability to make autonomous healthcare decisions, and accordingly minimises safeguarding risks to their longer-term physical and mental health (Black and Moon, 2022). Queer Theory, in turn, rejects and seeks to overturn all conventional boundaries and constraints, in order to maximise the widest possible opportunities for achieving personal liberty, whether behavioural, intellectual, social, or sexual in nature.
According to Judith Butler, arguably the leading exponent of Queer Theory, the term ‘Queer’ “means not following a developmental model of sexuality, or gender, or the transition from childhood to adult” (PJ: emphasis added; Jones, 2021). The MOU, although understandably coy on this key issue, has seemingly been quite reluctant to clarify for signatory organisations whether or not their policy applies only to therapy with adults, or whether it also includes children under 18 years. After some prevarication, the MOU then informed the UKCP that it did, in fact, apply to children, leading to the UKCP Board’s principled decision to withdraw from the MOU in 2024.
Conclusion
The BACP has now effectively queered its own Draft Ethical Framework and brought it more closely into line with the MOU, in denying any substantive differences between therapy with adults and therapy with children. This is significant victory for the Queer Theory movement and for gender identity ideology. It represents a major setback for child protection and safeguarding practice within UK therapy, which urgently needs to be taken up and addressed at the highest levels.
References
Black, K. and Moon, I. (2022) “Working with trans children and young people in therapy”, pp. 177-198, In J. Czyselska (Ed) Queering psychotherapy. Karnac: London.
British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy (BACP) (2018) Ethical Framework for the Counselling Professions. Lutterworth: BACP. https://www.bacp.co.uk/events-and-resources/ethics-and-standards/ethical-framework-for-the-counselling-professions
British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy (BACP) (2023) Equality, diversity and inclusion strategy. https://www.bacp.co.uk/media/17309/bacp-equality-diversity-and-inclusion-strategy-feb-2023.pdf
British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy (BACP)(2024) Memorandum of Understanding on Conversion Therapy. https://www.bacp.co.uk/events-and-resources/ethics-and-standards/mou
BACP (2025a) Draft Ethical Framework for the Counselling Professions. https://www.bacp.co.uk/media/23628/ethical-framework-for-the-counselling-professions-2025.pdf
BACP (2025b) Statement of support for the trans community. https://www.bacp.co.uk/news/news-from-bacp/2025/24-april-statement-of-support-for-the-trans-community/?utm_source=Facebook&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=Orlo
Holder, A. (2005) Anna Freud, Melanie Klein and the psychoanalysis of children and adolescents. Karnac: London.
Howard, A. (2000) Philosophy for counselling and psychotherapy. MacMillan: London.
Jenkins, P. (2024) The Impact of the BACP’s Equality, Diversity and Inclusion Strategy. Part 1 – Gender Identity. Critical Therapy Antidote. https://criticaltherapyantidote.org/2024/01/09/the-impact-of-the-bacps-equality-diversity-and-inclusion-strategy-part-1-gender-identity/
Jenkins, P. and Sears, T. (2024) Queer Theory and the MOU. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P9plUXfti48
Jones, O. (2021) Owen Jones: Interview with Judith Butler. (1.33-1.48 mins).https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tXJb2eLNJZE
O’Dowd, J. (2017) “Learning from complaints”, Therapy Today, 18 (2), March, p. 50.
United Kingdom Council for Psychotherapy (UKCP) (2024) Update on conversion therapy. 5th April. UKCP update on conversion therapy
Legal references
For Women Scotland Ltd (Appellant) v The Scottish Ministers (Respondent) [2025] UKSC 16 https://supremecourt.uk/cases/uksc-2024-0042
Forstater v. CGD UKEAT/0105/20/JOJ. Maya_Forstater_v_CGD_Europe_and_others_UKEAT0105_20_JOJ.pdf (publishing.service.gov.uk)
By Peter Jenkins, counsellor, supervisor, trainer and researcher in the UK. He has been a member of both the BACP Professional Conduct Committee and the UKCP Ethics Committee. He has published a number of books on legal aspects of therapy, including Professional Practice in Counselling and Psychotherapy: Ethics and the Law (Sage, 2017). https://uk.sagepub.com/en-gb/eur/counselling-and-psychotherapy-professional-practice/book243292
Peter is also a member of Thoughtful Therapists. His critique of the Memorandum of Understanding on Conversion Therapy was described as ‘instrumental’ in persuading the UKCP Board of the case for leaving the MOU in 2024.
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