The last time Erin saw her youngest child, she was driving them to a friend’s house. The bright-eyed youngster was sitting in the back of the car and, eager to start the playdate, bolted out the door as soon as they pulled up to park, shouting: ‘I’ll see you later!’
That was six years ago. ‘I didn’t even get out for a goodbye hug or a kiss because they were already running down the path,’ Erin recalls. ‘I never saw them again.’
Later that day in 2019, Erin attended a Family Court hearing, at which a judge ruled that the child she had dropped off at that playdate and their older sibling, who were then both of primary school age, should be instantly removed from her care and transferred to live with their father. She was prevented from contacting them.
In the long years that followed, she’s had no phone calls, no photographs, no school reports, and not one update on their welfare.
‘I was effectively stripped of all parental responsibility,’ she explains. ‘It’s like a walking death sentence. It’s not a normal kind of grief, because you are grieving for someone who is still alive.
‘There are parents behind bars for serious violent crimes who have more contact with their children,’ she adds.
Erin is not a violent criminal. Neither is she serving a prison sentence. Instead, she is one of hundreds of parents whose fate, in the Family Court, has hinged on evidence given by a psychologist named Melanie Gill.
Gill, who is 67, has for the past 15 years carved out a career as a prolific expert witness, appearing – by her own reckoning – in almost 200 cases, for which she charges up to £10,000 apiece.
Melanie Gill’s career as a courtroom psychologist turns out to be based on a hugely controversial field that the Family Justice Council recently dubbed as ‘harmful pseudoscience’
Gill and several other unregulated psychologists have been working in Britain’s Family Courts for many years – with horrific consequences for parents
She typically interviews the parents and children who are involved in a custody battle, then writes psychological reports that inform the judge’s ruling.
This is, needless to say, a hugely sensitive role, in an arena where contested allegations of sexual assault, domestic abuse and coercive control are often aired. Outcomes of cases where Gill gives evidence have a profound effect. They can overshadow entire lives.
Indeed, at least a dozen children have lost contact with one parent or both following rulings made in Family Court cases where she has appeared.
One might expect Gill’s methods and professional standing to be beyond reproach. But in fact, the exact opposite is true.
For her lucrative career as a courtroom psychologist turns out to be based on a hugely controversial field that an official report by the Family Justice Council recently dubbed ‘harmful pseudoscience’.
Gill describes herself as a ‘highly specialised’ expert witness. But her specialisation involves diagnosing something called ‘parental alienation syndrome’. Proponents believe it’s a condition where a child has rejected one of their parents after being manipulated by another.
Critics, including the authors of the Council’s report, regard it as a ‘discredited concept’.
What’s more, Gill’s work is entirely unregulated.
She is not registered with the Health and Care Professions Council (HCPC) and her principal academic qualifications include a third class psychology degree from Brunel University – to work in the NHS you must usually have at least a second class undergraduate degree – plus a postgraduate qualification from Leeds, where she studied Child Forensics, Psychology and Law but was awarded a diploma rather than a Master’s Degree because she failed to complete her dissertation.
On the business front, her track record hardly inspires confidence.
Declared bankrupt in 2008, she has connections to a string of dissolved companies and is currently paying off a £50,000 debt to HMRC in connection with the 2023 collapse of her consulting firm Keighly Gill (recent Companies House filings suggest she is giving the receivers £790 a month).
As for her rambling professional CV, it was once described by England’s most senior family judge as a ‘diffuse and confusing narrative’ which made it ‘hard’ for any layman ‘to drill down and see what her underlying qualifications’ actually are.
The chickens finally came home to roost after the High Court issued a landmark legal judgment rejecting Gill’s evidence in a 2020 case that led to a mother losing custody of her two daughters.
The woman, known only as ‘O’, had been dubbed a ‘narcissist’ by Gill and accused of alienating the children from their father.
The district judge in the 2020 case therefore ruled that ‘O’ should henceforth have ‘only limited’ contact with the girls, who were then aged seven and ten. They were removed from her custody that day. She was then limited to contact once a fortnight, under supervision.
At least a dozen children have lost contact with one parent or both following rulings made in Family Court cases where Gill has appeared
‘O’ decided to fight the ruling. And five long years later her case reached the High Court, where it was heard by Mrs Justice Judd.
Her findings, which were published last week, were extraordinarily critical. The district judge, who had relied on Gill’s evidence, had drawn conclusions based on ‘an uncertain and indeed mistaken foundation’.
So flawed had Gill’s psychological assessment been that it was ‘very difficult to retain any of what she says as a base for future decision-making’, added Justice Judd.
For ‘O’, whose daughters are now 12 and 15, the ruling does very little to redress five years of suffering, although she is now allowed to see her daughters without supervision.
‘The damage caused by Melanie Gill… will stay with me and my girls for a lifetime,’ she told the Daily Mail. ‘I’ve missed out on all the important milestones in their lives: school plays, birthdays, sports days, first periods.’
Yet for the hundreds of other parents who have been on the wrong end of Family Court cases in which Gill has appeared, it could have profound implications.
Claire Waxman, the incoming Victims’ Commissioner, has asked for ‘every case in which Gill or any other unregulated expert has diagnosed parental alienation and where children were removed from their parents’ to be reviewed, saying: ‘It is a national scandal.’
In the event such a review leads to significant numbers of custody rulings being branded unsafe, Gill would surely find herself at the centre of one of the most appalling miscarriages of justice in British legal history. So how did a former bankrupt, with a ‘confusing’ CV, end up giving expert evidence in so many critically important court cases in the first place? And what allowed an unregulated psychologist peddling ‘harmful pseudo-science’ to carry on doing it for so long?
One thing we can be sure of is that the pink-haired Melanie Gill came to her current line of business relatively late in life.
Born in the Lancashire town of Chorley in 1957, she was educated at Merchant Taylors’ Girls School in Crosby, a prestigious institution which is now part of the £31,000-a-year Merchant Taylor School, before taking the aforementioned third from Brunel University in 1980.
For the next two decades, she has recalled working ‘extensively as an entrepreneur in the music business and TV industry’. In 1985, her Brighton-based business, Endless Self Promotion, was on the front page of Music Week.
Then psychology called. In her early forties, she gained her diploma in Leeds, before returning to the south coast where she juggled her new career with Conservative politics. In 2004, she tried to become the party’s candidate in Kemptown, near to the £750,000 home on a Georgian square in Hove where she lives with her partner David Keighley.
Despite failing to win selection, Gill won some friends in Tory circles and for a time advised Iain Duncan Smith’s Centre for Social Justice think-tank.
Her business ventures are best described as eccentric.
In 2005, a Times article told how Gill – who it described as a ‘child forensic psychologist’ – had launched Commonsense Associates, a firm whose ‘undercover investigators’ would help parents catch and potentially prosecute their child’s school bullies.
‘They would collect evidence such as emails and text messages and even get bullied children to wear a ‘wire’ to record abuse by their tormentors,’ the article claimed, quoting Gill saying: ‘Let’s not call it bullying. Let’s call it what it really is – harassment, GBH, stalking.’
The venture failed and Commonsense Associates was dissolved a few months later.
In 2005, a Times article told how Gill – described as a ‘child forensic psychologist’ – launched a firm that would help parents catch and potentially prosecute their child’s school bullies
When Gill was declared bankrupt in 2008, official records showed she was working as a doctor’s receptionist. Oddly, her CV on the networking website LinkedIn tells a different story. It makes no mention of her working as a receptionist, stating that she instead spent the 2000s as a ‘policy adviser on neuroscience’ (one assumes to the Conservatives) and an ‘Associate Hospital Manager’ for Sussex Partnership NHS Foundation Trust, sitting on its Mental Health Act Committee from 2002-2018.
(Citing data protection, the Trust can neither confirm nor deny that she held such roles, saying the people who do them are ‘lay volunteers’ not employees.)
She appears to have embarked on her career as an expert witness in 2010. Central to the controversy are two important factors.
Firstly, under UK law, anyone at all can call themselves a ‘psychologist’. There is no official regulator and the job title isn’t protected (though nine specific professions such as ‘clinical psychologist’ and ‘forensic psychologist’ very much are).
To give expert evidence in the Family Court as a ‘psychologist’, one need only convince a judge that you have suitable credentials. Critics say this can lead to unqualified people giving crucial evidence that influences hugely important custody decisions.
And Gill’s credentials are not as blue chip as her CV suggests.
One version of the document, published in 2020, said she was qualified to ‘assess for’ Autism Spectrum Disorder, something that can only be done by a fully qualified and regulated clinician.
Meanwhile, the HCPC wrote to Gill in 2022 asking her to remove a claim that she was ‘trained in child forensic psychology’ on the grounds that it ‘could be misunderstood to infer that Ms Gill is a Forensic Psychologist’.
Then there is controversy about the entire concept of ‘parental alienation syndrome’, in which she specialises.
First identified by an American child psychiatrist named Richard Gardner in the 1980s, it revolves around the idea that, in some circumstances, a mother or father can manipulate their offspring to reject the other parent.
Yet while sceptics accept that children can sometimes be manipulated during separations, they do not believe it results in a ‘syndrome’ that any psychologist (particularly an unregulated one) can possibly diagnose.
The problem is that Gill and several other unregulated psychologists have been offering such diagnoses in Britain’s Family Courts for many years – with horrific consequences for the parents on the wrong end of ensuing judgments.
Take Erin, the mother who had both her children removed from her care. GP and police records seen by the Daily Mail suggest that she had been the victim of domestic violence. The court’s decision in 2019 to nonetheless prevent her seeing her children was made ‘principally on the basis of the report from Melanie Gill’, who accused Erin of alienating her children from their father.
Sceptics accept that children can sometimes be manipulated during separations, they do not believe it results in a ‘syndrome’ that any psychologist can possibly diagnose
It was also reached ‘with support from the children’s guardian and the local authority’. For years after this judgment was handed down, she had no idea where they lived, went to school, or what they looked like. She was forbidden from sending birthday cards.
‘It’s a barbaric order for the court to make – cutting a child off from their mum knowing full well they are alive and well, is capable and loves them and wants to see them,’ Erin says.
Light only began to be shed on the scandal in 2022 when journalists began to be given improved access to the previously secretive Family Courts. That helped first The Observer newspaper and then the Bureau of Investigative Journalism (BIJ), which had been alerted to growing concerns about Gill, to begin publishing a series of reports calling her credentials and methods into question.
Sir Andrew McFarlane, the most senior family court judge in the land, heard an appeal from a mother who had lost custody of her children in a case where Gill had given expert evidence.
While he didn’t overturn the ruling, he was critical of Gill’s evidence: ‘The decision about whether or not a parent has alienated a child is a question of fact for the Court to resolve and not a diagnosis that can or should be offered by a psychologist.’
Last December, the Family Justice Council went further. It published a report stating there is ‘no evidential basis’ that allows psychologists to diagnose parental alienation, cautioning that the field revolved around ‘harmful pseudo-science’.
It was therefore ‘inappropriate’ for expert witnesses to ‘step into fact-finding’ in court about whether it might have occurred. Which is exactly what Gill has done in many cases.
Gill did not respond to questions about her role in the growing scandal this week. However, she is believed to remain defiant.
In March, she told the BIJ that she was well-qualified to perform the role of expert witness, had years of specialist training and hit back at criticisms of her approach.
‘The narrative and questioning continue to show a significant gap in your understanding of regulation and evidenced-based assessment on these specific cases, and the very complex nature of the family dynamics involved and particularly the effects on children,’ she responded.
Gill blames her detractors for damaging her career and says she is the victim of a media ‘witch-hunt’.
‘There are brave judges trying to instruct me,’ she told the BIJ, ‘but the minute someone realises it’s me, they go out and they grab all the nasty people – the feminists, the journalists. And they start [going] on and on and on.’
Meanwhile, for Erin and others like her, this week’s developments offer hope. ‘This should be a defining moment,’ she said.
‘It’s time for the justice system to reflect, and apologise for the use of so-called ‘experts’ like Melanie Gill, who have enabled so many tragic miscarriages of justice.’
- Additional reporting by Hannah Summers
