Melanie Gill: Witch Hunt? – Beatrix Campbell

We cannot afford to proceed on the blinkered assumption that there have been no miscarriages of justice in the family justice system. This is something that has to be addressed with honesty and candour if the family justice system is not to suffer further loss of public confidence. Open and public debate in the media is essential.
— Sir James Munby, 19 March 2004

Introduction

This is a 30 minute read, which I’ve split into five sections following this introduction:

Melanie Gill
Who Is Melanie Gill?
The Backlash: Personal and Political Connections
Family, Faith and Flag: Backlash Politics
The Resistance

More than 20 years after Munby’s cautionary concerns, I expose suspected miscarriages of justice. It tracks the rise and rise of an unregistered and unregulated, go-to expert, Melanie Gill – she is not the only an advocate of discredited ‘parental alienation’ (P.A.) theory and practice, but she exemplifies its merciless impact on good enough mothers and their children.

How has a person with a faux CV been allowed to recommend ‘draconian’ decisions about children and families in the name of P.A.? And why have some judges been reluctant to consider challenges to her credentials and credibility.

1. Melanie Gill

Melanie Gill is not a household name, but she has been a persuasive psychological ‘expert’ in the family court for many years, described by a lawyer as ‘the goddess and guru of parental alienation’ – the theory that children have been indoctrinated and brainwashed by parents (mainly mothers) to denigrate and reject their (mostly) fathers for no good reason.

Gill is one of the P.A. ‘experts’ who are well-known in family law circles for extreme interventions in post-separation, high conflict and often high wealth cases in which children are instantly removed, against their expressed wishes, from (mostly) mothers about whom there had been no serious concerns, to (mostly) fathers against whom there had been findings and/or police reports of domestic abuse and coercive control.

Gill is not registered with the NHS regulator, the Health Care Professions Council, and she belongs to no recognised professional organisation. The British Psychological Society announced in 2025 – following accelerating concern about a ‘surge’ in P.A. cases and the role of unregistered psychologists in the family courts – that they must belong to a new Register of Expert Witnesses open only to those who are HCPC registered.

Gill does not qualify for this BPS register or the HCPC. Consultant psychologist Jaime Craig, a veteran of the Family Justice Council (FJC), is scathing: ‘If an expert is not HCPC registered, and therefore not employable in the NHS, education or probation, why do we think it is acceptable in these cases that are the most complicated? It is nonsensical.’ Nor does she adhere to Family Justice Council Guidance on P.A.

Some children have been banished from their mothers’ lives for years. Sometimes courts have insisted, on Gill’s recommendation, that contact be contingent on mothers undertaking therapy with Gill’s colleagues. Children have been forced to live with fathers accused of abuse and some have been compelled to endure re-programming therapy for years. Children are being framed as unwell by some P.A. practioners and according to Prof. Sonja Ayeb-Karlsson, ‘disciplined, punished and psychologically coerced’ into living with abusive fathers.

This is the context in which Gill has become a lightning rod in debates about the status and duties of experts – regulated and unregulated – and the ideology of P.A. about which, by her own account, she has been ‘a very vocal campaigner’.

She insists that her assessments (which, according to the Association of Clinical Psychology–UK she is not qualified to make) do not need to follow FJC guidance or judicial Practice Directions that oblige practitioners to take account of domestic and sexual abuse and coercive control.

‘That’s just bad psychology and bad science’, comments Dr Craig, an expert in hundreds of cases, ‘When I do an assessment I want everything – medical records, everything. You want as much rich detail as you can get. If you start by excluding evidence then your assessment is flawed.’

Nor has Gill felt the need to assimilate the evidence of other professionals or findings made by judges; ‘I find that shocking,’ said Craig.

Gill protests that she has been accused of being ‘a charlatan, fraud and a danger to the public’, that she has been witch-hunted, ‘targeted by women’s groups, radical feminists, and a group of psychologists who have aligned with P.A. deniers and domestic violence campaigners.’

Even judges are not spared: there’s a cohort ‘who haven’t got a bloody clue,’ she says in a covert conversation with a client in under-cover research, recorded by valiant investigators, Tortoise Media and The Bureau of Investigative Journalism. Some women judges, she goes on, are ‘completely and utterly biased’ and there are legal firms ‘infected by feminist ideology.’

Mistaken Foundation

Now she is taking the heat, her recommendations to remove children instantly to fathers have been revisited and repudiated in several recent cases – including a judgement to be published soon by the leading family judge in the land, Sir Andrew McFarlane.

Her career as an expert witness and the courtroom allure of ‘parental alienation’ may be over. One lawyer reckoned ‘she’ll never work in the family court again.’ Not because of a witch hunt, but because some children removed to their fathers are finding their way back to court – they want to go back to their mothers – and judges are beginning to reject the ‘mistaken foundation’ of her approach.

The Victims Commissioner, Clare Waxman and Right to Equality, a campaign for reform of the family courts, have called for a review of Gill’s cases. The government is worried about unregulated experts, but rejected a review. The demand exposes a lacuna in the family courts: in criminal justice, there is a system to address unjust convictions, the Criminal Cases Review Commission. It has been severely criticised for multiple failures following privatisation, cuts and a devalued forensic science sector stuck in ‘a graveyard spiral.’

Yet it exists while there is no equivalent in the family court system, and no mechanism to address the possible miscarriages of justice to which James Munby referred.

What, then, is to be done about redress for children who have been ruinously separated from their mothers, browbeaten by therapists and even persuaded by intensive ‘re-unification’ programming, borrowed from the US, that their mothers have abandoned or abused them? What hope is there for mothers who have lost their children, their homes, their jobs and their reputation – they are no longer allowed to work with children?

The latest cases prompting calls for a review have cited a 2023 landmark judgement in a case heard by McFarlane, Re C (‘Parental Alienation’; Instruction of Expert) in which he reiterated his Memorandum: Experts in the Family Court published in 2021, denouncing pseudo science. He cited Joy Brereton KC on Gill’s CV: ‘a diffuse and confusing narrative of attendance at courses and other activities’ that would have been ‘hard for the parties and the court to drill down to see what her underlying qualifications were.’

McFarlane declined to drill down. ‘If it were agreed,’ he said, that she was not qualified to act as an expert psychological witness, then that would have ‘a major impact’ on Gill’s ‘ability to continue to work as she currently does.’

Lawyers, professionals and mothers were sorely disappointed, ‘stunned,’ commented a consultant psychologist. McFarlane, it seemed, had decided to not decide.

Gill herself hailed the outcome as vindication and insisted that both ‘she and PA were exonerated‘. She was wrong, they weren’t.

But maybe ‘major impact’ is about to hit Gill: McFarlane will soon publish his judgement on a remarkable case heard at the end of January in Court 33 of the Royal Courts of Justice. It concerned a mother and son – he had found his way home to her after he had been banned from seeing her for nearly six years.

In another case, re O v C in December 2025, Mrs Justice Judd had been asked to set aside a finding based on a Gill report in 2020 resulting in children’s removal from their mother. She said that Gill’s assessment, made ‘through the narrow prism of attachment science,’ had been accepted by a previous judge as ‘fact’. But there was no ‘finding of fact about how the mother actually behaved.’ Therefore, was no finding with ‘a solid foundation’ to set aside, and Gill’s report ‘should not stand as such in any further assessment going forward.’

Despite this devastating conclusion, Judd did not venture a decision on Gill’s credentials – the court was not an appropriate forum, she said. If judges have so far recoiled from delving into Gill’s claims and qualifications, she has been the subject of intense scrutiny by scholars, lawyers, journalists and above all by mothers who have been outraged, terrified and grief-stricken by Gill’s assessments, who have picked themselves up, found each other and carried out their own forensic research.

They have been scaffolded in the UK by Louise Cooke’s Centre for Social Injustice website and #thecourtsaid (a family court survivors campaign), family court reformers Right to Equality, the Transparency Project, journalists and academic specialists, notably Julie Doughty, Adrienne Barnett and Sonja Ayeb-Karlsson. They have all drilled down and hastened the reckoning with P.A. experts.

2. Who Is Melanie Gill?

Who is Melanie Gill? Is she what says she is? When I asked her to respond to my questions she presented me with a ‘cease and desist’ demand, which I declined. So, who is this P.A. gladiator? These are the themes I invited her to address:

She is not registered with the Health and Care Professions Council (HCPC), she belongs to no professional psychology organisation and appears not to have professional indemnity insurance. In 2020 she was warned by the HCPC that her self-promotion as ‘trained in child forensic psychology’ contravened the law and should be amended.

According to her CVs, there are ‘few psychologists or psychiatrists trained in the range of assessment methods that she utilises’ in the UK courts. She lists multiple ‘specialisms’, ranging from autism to neuroscience, schizophrenia and sex offending, and membership of many organisations and training courses – a total of 80 – but provides no details of when or which, if any, carry certification.

Gill explains that she uses various psychological tests, mainly ‘attachment science’, known as Dynamic Maturational Model assessment. The ACP-UK points out that access to these tests is limited to psychologists qualified and licensed to use them. Gill is not qualified.

In any case claims for ‘attachment science’ that are ‘unmoored from evidence’ is challenged in a 2021 ‘consensus statement’ by international experts: ‘there is currently no research on the validity of attachment measures’ in adults and children in stressful circumstances such as divorce or separation: ‘The validity of attachment quality and caregiving behaviour is unknown under such circumstances.’ They were unequivocal: in courts attachment science ‘should never be used in isolation.’ But that, of course, is precisely what Gill insists that she does.

She has claimed to be a ‘member of the Family Justice Council’. There is no record of her ever being a member.

Gill was awarded her Bsc Hons Psychology by Brunel University in 1980. It was a mother who did her own ‘drill-down’ and discovered that Gill was among only two Brunel students in the lowest category, 3^rd class – not good enough to be admitted to a postgraduate psychology course.

Gill cites a Leeds University Masters (Pg Dip) in 2005. However, the Master’s was not completed, and the Diploma is not a Masters. The HCPC requires a Masters or Doctorate to work as a registered psychologist in the NHS. Gill has neither.

A mother recalled that during cross-examination in her case, Gill claimed that this Leeds diploma is her ‘second degree’. It isn’t a degree. Her diploma does not qualify her to practice clinically – that is, to diagnose and treat patients. Yet Gill claims she has ‘worked clinically’, is involved in ‘clinical practice’, and that she works with colleagues ‘in collaboration (in clinical and forensic case formulation).’

In a 2020 CV (they change a little over time) she insisted that she is ‘regulated and accredited by the Academy of Experts at the highest level (full practicing member) accredited and vetted for her expertise in both her primary discipline (psychology) and her experience of litigation procedures.’

In a 2021 case, a judge also confirmed that Gill is ‘in fact regulated… a member of the Academy of Experts.’ And in 2022 another judge described her as ‘undoubtedly an expert’, accredited by the Academy that ‘regulates members through their disciplinary procedure.’ In her evidence Gill has claimed that she is ‘accredited’ by the Academy of Experts.

But the Academy told me that it is not a regulator, it does not ‘vet’ or accredit members and it does not provide oversight. Experts are expected to be members of ‘the appropriate organisation or academic or other appropriate qualifications’ and so, ‘as such the Academy is nota regulator.’ Nor is it accredited by the Professional Standards Authority.

The Academy acknowledges that it does not check CVs, and it steers complainants to the experts’ professional bodies. Since Gill is not a member of any professional body, there is nowhere for complainants to be steered to, nowhere for her to be made accountable. Despite a mother’s many requests in a 2021 case, Gill did not provide evidence of Professional Indemnity Insurance – a requirement of the Ministry of Justice/Family Court Practice Direction 25B.

By contrast, the Institute of Experts told me that it requires proof at the ‘highest level’ of professional indemnity, proof of registration, provision of a closed case for its own experts to assess compliance and quality.

Practice Direction 25B specifies engagement with ‘accepted supervisory mechanisms’ – to ensure reflection and good practice – but Gill argues that she doesn’t need supervision because it is ‘is implicit within her reports.’ Senior professionals are bemused, they have told me that they wonder whether she understands what supervision is.

The CV claims that she has ‘published widely on family breakdown, the early years (neuroscience and attachment), mental health and personality disorder, attachment science…’

A Google Scholar literature search yielded nothing by Gill. She had however, published two shortcommentaries on modern mothering and family breakdown: in The Conservative Woman on 26 June 2014, and the Daily Mail on 26 July 2006. And in January 2026, following publication of recent judgements rejecting her findings, she has turned to The Conservative Woman to elaborate her anti-feminist political/professional creed and her rejection of the concept ‘coercive control’ adopted in legislation in 2015.

She participated in working parties convened in the early 2000s by former Tory party leader Iain Duncan Smith’s Centre for Social Justice, a response both to the Conservative Party’s need to come up with new social policy, and to challenge the Labour government’s novel initiatives – legislation on violence against women and one of its most successful and popular creations, Sure Start community hubs for pre-schoolers and their parents.

Sure Start was the first strategic programme for public childcare since the 1945 Labour government dissolved Britain’s national network of wartime nurseries. It met a dismal fate under Coalition and Conservative governments and by 2020 more than a third of Sure Start centres had been closed

In 2006 Gill was on the CSJ’s ‘family breakdown’ group, in 2008 it published The Next Generation, in which she is described as a ‘Child Forensic Psychologist’.

The CSJ also said that while contributing to its working parties as a psychologist, she was also ‘working part-time in a GP surgery.’ I asked an eminent linguistics professor (unconnected to these debates) how that description would be interpreted: ‘I would infer that she is attached to the practice as a professional psychologist, maybe doing child or family therapy sessions or some sort of counselling: lots of GPs do employ people like that.’

In fact, Gill was the surgery’s receptionist, and her employment had been ‘acrimoniously’ terminated, the GP told me.

Her CVs repeat a claim published in The Next Generation: ‘Recently she was on a commission examining the role of social services and child protection, chaired by Lady Butler-Sloss and Lord Laming.’ Invited to confirm this, Lord Laming commented, ‘try as I have I just cannot bring to mind our collaborating on the matter.’

Gill was indeed a member of the CSJ’s commission, but Laming and Butler-Sloss did not chair it, they were merely patrons. She also says she ‘contributed to the last report from Lord Laming investigating the death of ‘Baby P’ (2009)’. She is not acknowledged anywhere in the report. (She may, of course, have offered evidence, like many other professionals.)

Her CVs claim she was a ‘founding member’ of the Association of Family and Conciliation Courts Europe 2016. The original AFCC was formed in the US in 1963, and its executive director Peter Salem told me, ‘There was interest in an AFCC Chapter in Europe beginning in 2016,’ but it didn’t happen, ‘We never established a chapter in Europe.’

Gill says she is a Member of the Royal Society of Medicine – an Associate member. Anyone with an interest in health can join the RSM. She claims to have a ‘Law Society Accredited degree’. The Law Society told me it doesn’t directly accredit degrees, ‘We don’t do degrees.’

Gill acknowledges that her training is ‘not standard in the training of psychological disciplines’.

Her CV says she is an ‘ad hoc volunteer’ with the International Association for the Study of Attachment, and ‘a policy adviser to government for the last 15 years bringing psychological knowledge to policy on families and children,’ currently involved in ‘projects in connection with parental alienation and family court justice.’

Gill says she was ‘on the committee of the Association for Infant Mental

Health (AIMH) for 8 years.’ What committee? The AIMH told me that it was a ‘voluntary ad hoc advocacy committee.’ Gill also claimed, bizarrely that she had encouraged Penelope Leach, author of the best-selling 1977 book, Your Baby and Child, to ‘write a book’.

Gill is a regular lecturer for the Conflict Science Institute, which in the 2020s acknowledged that, though she lacked ‘scientific findings,’ she is ‘the Executive Director and Head of Assessments at the Family Attachment Consultancy where she uses a variety of methodologies ‘to formulate a systemic understanding of family needs to support treatment and family healing recommendations.’

But Companies House records show something a little different: Gill’s Family Attachments Consultants (its correct title), founded in 2017 by Gill and therapist Chip Chimera, was dissolved in 2019.

She claims membership of the International Society for Schema Therapy (ISST).

Forensic mothers who delved, discovered that she was only an associate member, which can be acquired for a small fee, but confers no qualifications. In her reports and CVs, however, Gill has claimed to carry out specialist ‘schema’ questionnaires and to ‘administer schema assessments.’ But the ISST comments, ‘she cannot perform any assessment whatsoever.’

This matters, says Dr Craig, current president of the Association of Clinical Psychologists-UK, ‘Psychological tests are licensed: you have to be qualified to buy them and use them.’ But Gill ‘isn’t qualified to buy any of them, he added, ‘It’s like we don’t allow just anybody to buy anti-biotics.’

It appears, then, that Gill’s CVs are not only a ‘confusing and diffuse’ they are ‘economical with the actualite’.

3. The Backlash: Personal and Political Connections

So, how did Gill get to be in a position to recommend life-changing decisions in the family courts? Her trajectory is a mystery exercising lawyers, parents and professionals alike. How did it happen?

Before she became a P.A. expert witness Gill worked in music industry public relations. One of the deep-diving mothers found her in a 1985 front page story in the Music magazine: with seemingly great prescience and panache Gill’s company was called Endless Self Promotion.

The spirit of self-promotion seemed to animate Gill’s business life – she launched (and dissolved) several companies; she quit the music business at the end of the 1990s and began to appear in the media and in the elite milieu of the Conservative Party as a psychologist. Her political connections apparently helped to propel her from the music and media business to Tory party business and, I suggest, the family courts.

In 1995 she had launched Commonsense Associates. It was dissolved and re-incarnated as Commonsense Approach in 2004. It, too, was dissolved in June 2005 and a month later she formed Commonsense Associates, operating at Sussex Medical Chambers in Hove, aiming to offer specialist assessments and therapy – including herself as a ‘child forensic psychologist’. I have been unable to trace any of its activities.

At the time she was working part-time at a Brighton GP’s surgery where, her employer told me, they were aware of her ‘interest in the Conservative party’. In 2004 she announced that she hoped to stand in Brighton Kemptown as the Conservative candidate, ‘I want to influence policy not just follow it,’ she said. Her hair was died pink – and remains so to this day – in the hope that it would challenge Tory stereotypes, ‘my hair is the best tool of communication I’ve ever had,’ she explained. Future Tory party leader David Cameron was in ‘hug a hoodie’ mode that tried to distance the Tories from their historic crime ‘hang ‘em and flog ‘em’ rhetoric.

Gill’s colleagues at the surgery were aware that she not only had political ambitions but also had aspirations to ‘start her business idea helping troubled kids.’ She’d only received her Leeds diploma in 2005, yet in July 2005 that business became Commonsense Associates – celebrated by Cameron in a speech at a Centre for Social Justice conference in Brighton on 8 July: ‘Imagine the benefits of Melanie Gill’s Commonsense Associates replicated beyond Brighton’. But Commonsense Associates wasn’t up and running yet.

On 15 July 2005 the Brighton Argus announced that Gill was opening a ‘new service working to solve complex family problems – especially those involving “problem” children’. Working ‘in conjunction with Kids Company in London,’ Commonsense Associates would be a private ‘multi-disciplinary team covering psychology, paediatrics, the law, the social services and nursing’, with ‘a revolutionary holistic approach’ and a ‘radical new approach to bullying.’

The Argus reported that prices for the private anti-bullying service ‘start from £25 for an advice phone call’ (around £50 at today’s prices). School bullies could be ‘caught and prosecuted using private detectives’ hired by parents as a last resort, and victims might ‘wear a “wire” to record abuse.’ I have been unable to find any further accounts of its activities.

A week later, Gill appeared in the Daily Mail: ‘Dogmatic feminists may not like me for saying this, but my role as a psychologist working with families has shown me that the fashionable, modernist determination to ignore the importance of motherhood has helped to create emotionally inadequate, bewildered and angry, young people.’ Not exactly in synch with her later proposed purges of mothers, and the impact on ‘bewildered and angry’ young people.

The social work weekly, Community Care, also reported that Gill was working with a family whose children were self-harming. She signed a press letter in 2006 on the ‘malaise of childhood’, citing Commonsense Associates and describing herself as a ‘child forensic psychologist’.

Bankrupt: profit and loss

By 17 April 2008 Gill was declared bankrupt and Commonsense Associates was struck off. One of the mothers discovered that she is described in Companies House records of Commonsense Associates not as a psychologist but merely as a ‘doctor receptionist’ – though by then the surgery no longer employed her.

Gill’s debt was £85,803 (in today’s money £148,474). How did a former doctor’s receptionist accumulate such a debt in only four years that, according to the records, took the next 13 years to pay off? Oddly, given the very long and detailed inventories in her subsequent CVs, Commonsense Associates (and her bankruptcy) is not mentioned.

A decade later, in 2017 Gill formed Family Attachment Consultants Ltd with psychotherapist Chip Chimera, describing them as experts in P.A. It went bust and was struck off in 2019.

Yet a Gill CV in 2020, headed Keighley Gill Consulting/ Family Attachment Consultants (both registered at her home in Brighton), describes working with colleagues ‘in collaboration (on clinical and forensic case formulation, therapy planning and in reviewing filmed attachment assessments) with therapists including Chimera and Raphael Lopez de Soto’.

Family Justice Council guidance is unequivocal: ‘if a psychologist expert recommends an intervention or therapy that they or an associate would benefit financially from delivering this would be ‘a clear conflict of interest and threat to the independence of their expert evidence.’

One mother who resisted Gill’s recommended therapy with her colleagues, recalled that when Gill was reminded how they were ‘brought into this case’, she denied that they were in business together: they merely shared a website.

In 2023 Melanie Gill was again declared bankrupt: her business, Keighley Gill Consultancy was dissolved in 2023 owing £82,747,00 – of which £50,197 was due to the HMRC. According to the records, Gill said that she couldn’t afford to repay this debt but, helped by her partner, David Keighley, it was agreed that she could contribute monthly installments of £790.

4. Family, Faith and Flag: Backlash Politics

Melanie Gill’s strange story is part of a larger political history – ‘parental alienation’ as a flank in the 1980s backlash against children’s rights, feminism, women’s autonomy, and women and children’s allegations of control, violence and sexual abuse.

It is a narrative familiar to child welfare professionals and social historians – reprised in my book, Secrets and Silence – a pattern was identified by media scholar Prof. Jenny Kitzinger in her book, Framing Abuse: whenever the media discovered sexual abuse the discussion switched almost immediately to ‘major scandals about false allegations and inappropriate interventions.’

‘Parental alienation syndrome’ first caught my attention when it synchronized with another movement in the 1980s and 1990s, the ‘false accusations movement’: both impugned children, women and their professional and political advocates.

Accused adults launched the Victims of Child Abuse Laws campaign, later becoming the False Memory Syndrome Foundation (FMSF), an irresistible lure to the media in the 1990s. They were founded by a Lutheran pastor and psychologist Ralph Underwager, a charismatic witness for the defence until he was forced to resign from the FMSF advisory board after a 1993 interview in the Dutch magazine Paidika: he had proclaimed that, ‘With boldness’ paedophiles ‘can say “I believe this is in fact part of God’s will”.’

The FMSF ardently promoted Richard Gardner, who in 1985 coined the Parental Alienation Syndrome (PAS) – syndrome connoting science – in post-separation child custody cases. He was a member of the FMSF advisory board. Gardner explained their similarities and differences: ‘The parental alienation syndrome (PAS) is primarily a disorder of childhood. The false memory syndrome (FMS) is a disorder of young adults, primarily women. They share in common a campaign of acrimony against a parent.’

Note where he locates the ‘disorder’ – not in parents’ alleged bad behaviour, but in in the child. He believed that children were being brainwashed, a term used to describe not influence but nefarious ‘forcible indoctrination’ – the term used by Underwager, too: children’s resistance is the result of being programmed, usually by mothers, to making false allegations, often accompanied by ‘false sex abuse’ allegations.

Gardner, like Underwager, also held controversial views on sex with children. He argued that paedophilia was ‘widespread and accepted’, it was ‘considered the norm by millions of people in the history of the world’, it was ‘benign and beneficial to the reproduction of the human species.’

He gave evidence in hundreds of custody cases and in criminal cases, and his syndrome enjoyed a posthumous renaissance twenty years after his death when his alienation hypothesis (often minus the syndrome) featured in family proceedings in the US and the UK.

It flourished despite the absence of evidence. The concept and consequences of P.A. were repudiated by the World Health Organization in September 2020; mention of it was withdrawn from the International Classification of Diseases (ICD-11) and the European Parliament rejected it on 6 October 2021.

In the US, where the P.A. effect was dramatic, Professor Joan Meier, a pioneering advocate in the US Supreme Court, studied all published family court judgments across a decade: when parental alienation was invoked to counter mothers’ allegations of abuse of themselves and their children, it was usually successful; in only 15 per cent of such cases did courts accept mothers’ claims and typically mothers lost custody of their children.

In the UK, research by Brunel University Reader, Dr Adrienne Barnett, found that ‘Playing the parental alienation card is proving more powerful than any other in silencing the voices of women and children resisting abuse.’ Dr Craig, an expert witness in UK courts for two decades, confirms, ‘there is a rich seam of misogyny. I’ve never seen a case with allegations of alienation without allegations of domestic abuse – it is almost entirely a reaction to allegations.’

This is often compounded by women’s hesitation in disclosing their experiences, ‘discouraged’ by the impact of coercive behaviour. Research by a team led by Dr Julie Doughty for the Welsh government found that despite a torrent of papers written about P.A., there was a ‘dearth of empirical studies’ to back up the concept and ‘no reliable data on its prevalence, lack of agreement on definitions, difficulty in assessing what is outright alienation and what is justifiable estrangement arising from a parent’s behaviour as perceived by the child, and lack of data on longitudinal outcomes of interventions’.

I suggest that P.A. is a backlash ideology that nestled nicely in far right Conservative politics in the 2000s, when it endeavoured to find a new voice against the public sector and public broadcasting, against Europe, climate change research, social democratic governance generally, and of course, feminism.

In 2006 Gill founded the Mindful Policy Group – not to be confused with current mindfulness and wellbeing practices – chaired by Lewes Conservative MP Tim Loughton. Warning against ‘paternalistic government’ and ‘institutions to influence families’ in a 2010 speech as Education Secretary, his department nevertheless invested in father-friendly-family projects – £444,000 was awarded to the anti-feminist P.A. project, the Centre for Separated Families.

The Mindful Policy Group’s managing director was Gill’s partner David Keighley – the other half of Keighley Gill Consulting. In 2014 Keighley, Loughton and others set up the Mindful Policy Experts Group Ltd. It was dissolved in 2017.

Against Leftism, Feminism and Modernism

David Keighley was a ‘media consultant’ and later a psychotherapist. He had worked as a journalist and PR man for the BBC and then as head of publicity for TV AM, a company formed by Australian broadcaster Bruce Gyngell, an intrepid adversary against trade unions and a favourite of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher.

In 1999 Keighley and Kathy Gyngell (former television producer and Bruce Gyngell’s widow) formed Minotaur Media Watch, later Newswatch, and then News-watch, to monitor the BBC for alleged left-wing bias, pro-Europe, immigration and climate change science. It appeared to triumph in the 2020s with the appointment of Conservatives to the board of the BBC.

Keighley contributed to Brexit Central, active in a participant in networks of right-wing think tanks, he writes regularly for another Gyngell creation, The Conservative Woman, of which he is an editorial board member; its mission is ‘a counter-cultural offensive against the forces of Leftism, feminism and modernism,’ the ‘indoctrinating BBC’, the ‘feminist equality agenda,’ vaccination and the theory of climate change. It is for ‘family, faith and flag.’

These connections to the far right of the Conservative Party provided Gill with a political context for her professional activism and P.A. advocacy. If there was any doubt about Gill’s bias, it was palpable in the 2025 report by Tortoise Media and The Bureau of Investigative Journalism under-cover conversations with Gill disparaging the Family Court and its president, Sir Andrew McFarlane.

Gill’s specific target is the impact of women’s experience and feminist campaigns for legislative reform. In 2026, when her court career was in free fall, she denounced the 2015 addition of ‘coercive control’ to legislation against violence and abuse against women and girls. She reckoned that the concept had travelled from United Nations agencies without scientific scrutiny, without a ‘forensic backbone,’ encouraged by feminist campaigns pushing ‘one simple story: ‘women are victims, men are perpetrators’; feminists, she added, had ‘ruthlessly’ kept P.A. out of domestic abuse legislation. Here was the apocalypse; ‘family erasure on a monumental scale.’

5. The Resistance

Only recently that Gill et al were routinely named in court judgements. Mothers at risk of losing not only their reputation as ‘good enough’ parents but also their children have had to become sleuths in the uncovering of Melanie Gill; media movements have campaign hard and successfully for transparency.

Most mothers in family proceedings would not have known about the impact of Gill and other P.A. experts; they would not necessarily have noticed research by the gimlet-eyed #thecourtsaid (a family court survivors’ movement) and the Centre for Social Injustice, an unyielding social media critic of former Tory leader Iain Duncan Smith’s Centre for Social Justice, set up in 2003 (in which Gill participated). Nor would they have expected to have to become detectives in their own lives, tracking the accuracy of her CV. They would not have known Gill’s true opinions about the family courts, in which she had been so successful, until the 2025 TBIJ and Tortoise Media undercover investigation exposed Gill’s prejudices and disrespect for other professionals.

They would not have known that Gill – on her own admission – does not adhere to the FJC guidelines on the duties of experts: that they should be registered with the NHS regulator, the Health and Care Professions Council, they should take account of the Ministry of Justice rules governing the courts, the Practice Directions on violence, sexual abuse and coercive control, on current accepted research, and they should be impartial.

‘We were shocked,’ recalled a mother – and her lawyers agreed – after Gill was asked in court if she had considered police records of reported violence or abuse or the assessments of other specialists: ‘I remember she said, ‘No”.’ And she had explained that her measure to divine families’ problems was her psychological tests. Fact-finding by the court on alleged abuse, she recalled, ‘would have “no point”,’ because it would not affect her own assessment based on unconscious psychological profiles.

A mother says she has never forgotten her astonishment at Gill’s answer when asked in court about the impact on her child of witnessing the father’s physical abuse: ‘she replied that “it wouldn’t have any…no impact at all…” and that ‘violent behavior was merely going on at the surface’.”

Gill’s anonymity and her credentials and methods have been challenged by the Transparency Project and by the Association of Clinical Psychologists-UK that, for years, have tried to intervene, criticising her claim to predict mothers’ future behavior from tests that she was not qualified to use, and her belief that these women’s supposed past trauma caused them to alienate their children from their fathers – and would go on doing so.

During the 2020s, shielding controversial experts’ identity in courts was so fiercely challenged that the President of the Family Division, Sir Andrew McFarlane, launched a pilot scheme allowing journalists to report on proceedings. In January 2025 the family courts nationwide were open to reporters.

The identification of experts had been starkly exposed in what has come to be known as the Croydon Case: a heroic mother excavated the CV of an unregulated expert, X, and persuaded the judge that X should be replaced by another who was properly qualified and registered with the HCPC. But the judge decided not to name X because it could ‘damage X’s reputation’.

Veteran court reporter Brian Farmer urged the judge to name X: ‘If a parent has any concerns about X they ought to be able to read about your decision.’ Since most parents would ‘assume that all experts are regulated’ they would be ‘surprised’ by your decision,’ he commented.

The mother, a finance professional, told me ‘I didn‘t know how to read the expert’s CV,’ so she did the digging herself. ‘Nobody, not the local authority or the lawyers, nor the Academy had checked it. Why did I have to do that myself?’ It was she who tracked down Gill’s meagre qualifications.

New transparency rules, now operational nationwide, enable a wider audience to access Gill’s idiosyncratic methods, her defiance of judicial practice directions, and her belief that children’s expressed wishes and feelings can be ignored because they have been brainwashed, and don’t have the ‘neurological architecture’ to think about what’s going on in their lives.

This is obviously contravenes judicial directions and judgements that stress the importance of a factual matrix and actual behaviour, rather than theory or ideological concepts that was emphasised in the landmark case, Re C (‘Parental Alienation’; Instruction of Expert).

So far, however, judges have decided that the courts are not an ‘appropriate’ forum to assess the honesty of Gill’s CVs. Though P.A. and pseudo science seem to be done for in family courts, the legacy bequeathed to children of ‘draconian’ judgements and ruined lives, proposed by ‘experts’ and accepted by judges, is yet to be addressed.

Photograph: Melanie Gill in 2022 by James Manning / PA