They are horrific images of young Chinese men with electrodes placed near their genitals and on their head before being subjected to huge doses of electric voltage to try and rid them of their homosexuality.

It’s been revealed that men are still regularly subjected to gay electric shock therapy in China, 15 years after it was no longer classified a ‘mental illness’.

Hospitals across the country continue to offer the brutal treatment, saying they can ‘cure homosexuality’. Their barbaric methods are exposed by the Dateline program.

Viewers are taken inside medical facilities like the Tianjin Mental Health Hospital where undercover activist, John Shen, is told he can be prescribed drugs and shock therapy.

‘It’s a small electric rod, when you have these urges, you shock yourself with the rod, then you know you should avoid these urges,’ a psychiatrist tells Mr Shen.

In one particularly confronting image it appears a nurse even places electrodes near the man’s genitalia as he calls out that ‘I’m nervous’.

‘Now what I want to make you to feel is scared,’ the clinician tells him as she sends the charge through his body.

China outlawed the classification more than 15 years ago but that hasn’t stopped the shocking practice taking place in medical facilities.

Undercover reporter