Parental Alienation: Hope may blow from ill-wind

Mother and son supported in the Royal Courts of Justice

Court 33, the Royal Courts of Justice, 29 January; often very cold: oak, benches,  windows aloft in this building in London opened by Queen Victoria in 1882;  the judge sits high up – no wig, just normal: suit, tie, spectacles, the President of the Family Division, Sir Andrew McFarlane, presides in what promised to be a landmark case, Re Y.

Below him were a few people – court officials, eminent family lawyers, journalists, and a mother applying to the judge to set aside a 2019 court-enforced ban on her having any contact with her children. Her alleged offence: inducing in her children ‘parental alienation’ against their father. 

And her son – a very unusual presence in Court 33. His supported his mother’s application, and he was determined to hear what was going to be said about him. Now a teenager, wearing a suit, he listened, focused and expressionless. He had insisted on being present – for six years  since he was ten, his voice, his feelings and his consistent, determined, expressed wishes to live with his mother had been dismissed by the family justice system. 

His presence in the quiet decorum of the court was, however, a detonator. Towards the end of 2025 he had found his way home to the mother he had been denied since 2019, when the court ordered no contact whatsoever. 

After that he had disengaged – he lived in a kind of emotional solitary confinement at school and in his father’s home, in a world that had utterly lost his trust.

His barrister Jo Delahunty argued that all the professionals who dealt with him and his older sister after their parents separated, acknowledged their intelligence and consistency:  the girl’s narrative, whose clarity and consistency had been affirmed, was ‘a gift’, said Delahunty. The boy had always been clear, he wanted to live with his mother. The children did not resist seeing the father – despite his history of alleged abusive behaviour – they simply wanted to live with their mother.  

Even though at the time, the family court had been repeatedly reminded that there should be fact-finding to establish what had been going on between his parents and their children, a psychological report by  CAFCASS-commissioned ‘expert’ Melanie Gill. had been allowed to pre-empt any findings of fact. Her assessment had been allowed to prevail. 

‘No professional, not one, does the right thing,’  said Delahunty. They were supposed to be ‘the eyes and ears of the children’  but anything that countered Gill’s ‘parental alienation’ hypothesis – that the children’s view could not be taken into account because they had been alienated by the mother’s purported unconscious disposition and  ‘vengeful’ hatred of their father – was ‘sidelined’ at every part of the process. 

Gill discounted not only the children’s views but also the evidence of medical and police reports on the father’s abuse. The biting irony, said Delahunty, was a ‘court-enforced alienation by court-order.’

Representing the mother, Justin Ageros argued that there was ‘very significant new evidence and information’ that cast doubt on the earlier findings and justified re-opening them – not least the approach to ‘parental alienation’ taken by McFarlane in Re C (‘Parental Alienation’; Instruction of Expert)[2023] EWHC 345.

Ageros pointed out that at no point before Gill’s involvement in 2019 were the children resisting seeing their father, and no independent recommendation had been made that it was necessary to remove them from their mother. 

The father had responded to the mother’s evidence of abuse with counter-allegations that had been investigated by social services and ‘not made out’. Ageros said it was ‘astonishing’ that CAFCASS had appointed someone to make an assessment with a ‘miasma of supposed qualifications’ that did not establish that she was qualified. If not then, certainly now she would not qualify as an expert. 

Furthermore, McFarlane in Re C had commended the opinion of the Association of Clinical Psychologists-UK: that it is that the court that should determine behaviour and that ‘parental alienation’ is ‘not a diagnosis that can or should be offered by a psychologist.’ 

But that was what Gill had done. She had dismissed the children’s views, and other evidence – including domestic abuse. Gill’s ‘parental alienation’ hypothesis then  ‘infected’ professional opinion said Ageros. 

The consequences of the ban on any contact had been devastating for the children and for the mother, who lost her career in education, and of course her children.

In his Re Y judgement, published on 20 February McFarlane was explicit: ‘the court must determine any relevant allegations of domestic abuse that have been made’ before evaluating children’s reluctance. The ‘factual matrix was a matter for ‘the court alone’ not a matter for expert psychological evidence.’

During the January hearing, McFarlane had cautioned that the case was technical, concerned not with Gill, but with processes; however, when he proposed that the court did not need to hear more about the boy’s experience, the teenager turned round to his barrister behind him and indicated that he wanted the court to hear it. 

He  had refused to participate in the therapy prescribed by Gill and conducted by one of her colleagues, Raphael Lopez de Soto,  based on the ‘parental alienation’ theory that he had been brainwashed, ‘The irony is that the  brainwashing was through the therapy,’ said Delahunty.

The therapy had ‘compounded’ the harm caused by Gill’s report; ‘Conversion therapy,’ commented the judge. De Soto  was part of the Gill enclave, said Delahunty, but now, for the first time the boy’s voice was being heard by those ‘with no agenda.’. 

Reminded that Gill had insisted on social media that in Re C she had been ‘exonerated’,  McFarlane’s Re Y judgement offered a stern rebuke: she had ‘fundamentally misunderstood the court’s judgment in Re C which was critical of her claim to any form of expert qualification and which strongly cautioned any court in the future from instructing an expert, such as Ms Gill, who is neither registered nor regulated.’ 

McFarlane’s judgement accepted the mother’s application, supported by her son, and set aside the 2019 findings: when ‘held up for audit against the principles of good practice in cases concerning alleged alienating behaviour which are now well established, every agency involved in these proceedings can be seen to have been at fault. By “every agency”, I am referring to CAFCASS, the children’s solicitor, the local authority and the court.’

In short, a total failure of the family justice system ‘in discharging its responsibility to protect the children and to prioritise their welfare needs.’

This case was unusual and radical  – typically ‘parental alienation’ cases like this founder on the rocks of time and money, and available legal mechanisms. But McFarlane invited the legal teams and, on their suggestion, members of the Family Justice Council, to consider proposals for potential alternative mechanisms for these cases to be reviewed. 

Watch that space.

For now, hope flourished in what had seemed a cruel, hopeless ill-wind.