Parental Alienation - A consideration of the High Court judgement in OvC - Part 3.

Richard Gregorian, Principal of Gregorian Emerson Family Law Solicitors, a firm with a unique legal-psychological approach to family law, responds to the Law Society Gazette article of Hannah Summers in the 24 October 2025 edition [reference is at the end of this article]

In the third part of these articles, I will consider the High Court case of O v C [see reference below].  Doing so, should be of limited value, if Hannah Summers summarised it in sufficient detail and if it does not contain a detailed analysis of the lower decisions of the court or Ms Gill’s psychological assessment.  The judgement is only 6 pages long, an indicator that what I am about to read will be a technical legalistic judgement, rather than any attempt at an “holistic” understanding of this family’s difficulties.

I will continue the approach of responding to points as they arise in the decision, to prevent opinion-related confirmation bias, which can creep in through reading the entire case, forming an opinion and then looking back at the case to maximise information which supports my opinion and minimise information which undermines it.  I will leave that to the family justice system.    

OvC is a High Court case, before Mrs Justice Judd, albeit at first instance, rather than appeal.  The application was by the mother to set aside findings made 5 years ago, on the basis of which she was ordered to have supervised contact with her children.  As I mentioned in Part 2, even before I read the article, I would have been extremely surprised if, due to the the passage of time, the children’s advancing ages and the fact that there was no other “exit ramp”, unsupervised contact was not the outcome (which it was).  After all, time is a great healer, when conflict resolution and psychological skill sets are not present in the family justice system to promote the healing of the damage which the children continued to experience, not only over the last 5 years but, since their parents separated, due to the parental conflict.  The mother had been taught her lesson, had suffered enough and “contact has to move on”.  These rather blunt considerations should not be discounted from an area of law driven by personal opinions. 

I see that Miss Gill, the court-appointed psychologist, on whose report supervised contact was, originally ordered, did recommend therapy for the mother.  That is certainly a positive step but only if there was also a conflict resolution dynamic to it.  Therapising one party because, apparently, they are a parental alienator does not permit the parental relationship to be looked at as a whole.  However, it is certainly better than approaching the case based on establishing superficial facts, on the balance of probabilities combined with blame.  The mother would have clearly felt threatened by the father.  The father may not have been to blame for that, although he may have borne a share of responsibility for it, even if that was, also, conflict-related.  Nothing I have said here, really adds anything to what I have already said in Part 2.

The judgement in OvC refers to the children’s residency being transferred to the father, with a package of therapeutic intervention.  It does not say whether that therapeutic intervention related to the father, as well or contained a conflict resolution element.  It does say that the mother had to engage in Schema therapy, without which unsupervised contact should not happen.  Nothing is said about whether she did so or why it took 5 years for that therapy “to work”.  It may have been because her feelings around the parental conflict and litigation were entirely appropriate, with the type of therapy ordered, failing to address the cause of them i.e. the conflictual relationship with the father, as exacerbated by the trauma of litigation.

At the end of the day, Miss Gill, the court-appointed mental health professional, only made recommendations.  The district judge was free to reject them, in the same way that the instructing lawyers were free to instruct Miss Gill to consider the mother’s emotional and psychological difficulties in the context of parental conflict, which I would be certain, they did not do. 

It appears that I was right about parental alienation being a species of parental conflict, where there has been prior judicial or expert involvement.  It seems that this mother lost residency, because of her reaction to Miss Gill’s recommendations.  That is not something which should be laid at the door of Miss Gill.  There is a world of difference between a mental health professional seeking to effect change in a voluntary and consensual way (on the one hand) and during traumatising litigation on the other.  One should always remember that Miss Gill’s recommendations would also have been seen and applied through the prism of the adversarial legal system where, I strongly suspect, her recommendations would have become yet another source of polarisation and blame by the parents’ legal representatives. 

It would be interesting to know why it took 5 years for this case to return to court.  I suspect much of that time would have been completely unrelated to the methodology by which the mother lost the children and more to do with her lawyers not daring to undermine the original District Judge because it is a sin, more than anything else, to seek to relitigate or “look behind the findings” of a previous judge, even if those findings are deeply questionable.  For those who say that the mother could have appealed, I suspect that bankrupt of emotional and/or financial resource, she did not have the heart or courage to do so.  It would have been another example of her resisting the system. 

It is interesting that the mother sought to reopen and set aside the findings of the original District Judge.  That speaks to the fact that the court clearly sees “parental alienation” as a factual problem.  Seen as a psychological/mental health issue, it could have been argued that whatever the findings were, since mental health fluctuates over time, the case could have been reopened far earlier.  Simple speculation but it does demonstrate how the courts prefer to view matters which are clearly emotionally and psychologically based, through the prism of facts, behaviour and a lack of empathy.

Indeed, in OvC, mother’s legal team sought to argue that the fundamental reason for reopening the question of her supervised contact was because since the case of Re C (Parental Alienation: Instruction of Expert) [2023] EWHC 345 , “parental alienation is not a syndrome capable of diagnosis but a process of manipulation of children perpetrated by one parent against the other, to what are termed “alienating behaviours”, which were matters of fact rather than mental health.  This rationale raises all sorts of inconsistencies and difficulties as follows:

• It matters little whether parental alienation is referred to as a syndrome or not. It is the impact of the parental behaviours which is important.
• There is a complete lack of understanding in the family justice system that parental alienation and its “offspring” priming, coaching and manipulation do not need to be intentional and, therefore, amenable to being perpetrated by the alienating parent. This is perhaps the most fundamental problem with the family justice system. It is to believe that the “parental alienator”, suffering from distress, threat, anxiety, upset, trauma, fear, inadequate coping mechanisms and lack of understanding of healthy conflict resolution, embarks upon a course of conduct, the intention and purpose of which is to alienate the other parent and so must be punished.  That demonstrates a fundamental lack of understanding of human behaviour, particularly in conflict and particularly in litigation.  It is akin to “judging a book by its cover”.  For the same reason, why not refer to 50% of parents in family litigation (those who lose) as being delusional.  After all, what they have been litigating for over many years and at great expense, is clearly factually incorrect and detached from (judicial) reality.  Absurd isn’t it!  The case histories in part one of my article, show how parents behave in alienating and undermining ways towards each other (typically both at the same time) because of the way they engage in conflict; indeed, in the way in which they are encouraged to engage in conflict in an adversarial family justice system.

It is shameful that lawyers whose “stock in trade” are human beings and conflict know nothing about the workings of either.  They are judged on the facts and on a balance of probabilities.  Worse still, they have no solution to help the family, except to tamper with the amount of parental contact or impose supervision.  Complex human emotions and behaviours, put through the “wringer” of blaming and undermining lawyers, the stress and trauma of family breakdown, conflict and litigation, conflicting opinions of professionals, let alone family and friends, and being unfairly blamed by a system that does not and cannot understand the complexity of the parents’ internal narrative and ”lived experience” is reduced down to observing parental behaviours, as lawyers, not even as experts in human behaviour.  However, it is indisputable that there has been a long running battle between lawyers (who know best) and the pseudoscience of psychologists and other non-legal experts, who are not considered their equals.

As I mentioned in the previous parts of this article, only a very simplistic understanding of human behaviour would fail to realise that simple notions, such as, “controlling behaviour”, emanates from feelings of being out of control or that an abuser does so, not from a position of power and control but from a “one down” position.  However, I do agree that the impact of these behaviours is everything, which makes it more important to understand how to change, rather than label, those behaviours.  That is not something the legal system can achieve and is even an uphill struggle after litigation has come to an end, due to the damage caused to the parents who have existed in emotional suspended animation, unable to emotionally move on, until litigation has ended. 

The judgement in OvC refers, in more detail, to the FJC guidance published in December 2024 regarding the 3 essential components of parental alienation.  I speculated those components will be based in fact and blame and, therefore, inevitably, they can be turned on their head.  I am proved to be correct.  The 3 components are as follows:

• the child is reluctant, resisting or refusing to engage in a relationship with a parent or carer- this may be attributable to a child caught in parental conflict (e.g. demonstrating divided loyalties), not necessarily because that child has been alienated. As mentioned above, that “parental alienation”, let alone the impact on the child, does not need to be intentional. Further, are we really looking at the child as a reliable barometer of parental alienation where, necessarily, he or she will have a very juvenile understanding of the parental conflict and its impact upon them.  Parental alienation and high parental conflict does not prevent many children from wanting their parents to reconcile, so the family can be reunited and the upsetting impact of the conflict, on them, in their mind, come to an end.  How does this type of approach, as reflected by this and the other 2 components, explain the, often, encountered difficulty where the mother (as the primary carer) takes a child to nursery and the child is unable to detach from the mother, showing signs of visible distress.  In other words, the child rejects the nursery.  The father says he does not have the same problem, so it must be the fault of the mother’s parenting.  However, what if the child has suffered attachment injury as a result of the loss of the family unit, which is exacerbated by an absence from the primary carer, whilst at nursery, and because of the stronger emotional bond with the mother, the child is able to express their upset to her, rather than the father.  Now where is the blame? It has, miraculously, vanished.

• The reluctance, resistance or refusal is not consequent on the actions of that parent towards the child, or the other parent, which may therefore be an appropriate justified reaction by the child, or is not caused by any other factor, such as the child alignment, affinity, or attachment. So, again, this component relies upon the blame game i.e. it must be the fault of one parent with the other innocent. However, what if both parents are innocent.  What if they are both responsible (different from, blame) for parental conflict which impacts the child’s relationship with both parents or its relationship with them, from the outside, is distorted as the child seeks to manipulate each parent by aligning with them when they are in that parent’s care.  That dynamic (which involves the actions of both parents, albeit seen through the prism of the (psychology of) conflict resolution, is not appropriately referred to in terms of intent and blame) will be present in 100% of cases of parental conflict.  Again, why should any test be based on the appropriate justified reaction of a child, whose objectivity and expertise in demonstrating where the problem lies, may be dependent upon which parent allows it to have unlimited ice cream.  The child is the least reliable reporter of whether its rejection of one parent is the fault of the other. 
• The other parent has engaged in behaviours that have directly or indirectly impacted on the child, leading to the child’s reluctance, resistance or refusal to engage in a relationship with that parent.” In other words, the flipside of the second component i.e. if the “non-alienating” parent is not guilty, then the other parent (the alienator) must be wholly guilty of the intentional conduct which leads to the alienation. Whilst attractive to binary thinking (which is judicially endorsed in the case law relating to fact-findings), it is grossly simplistic when seen through the prism of an understanding of human behaviour, emotion and the impact of conflict on them. 

One can test the integrity of these 3 components against the fact that where parental conflict is mentioned by judges or Cafcass, it is very rarely, if ever, directed at one particular parent.  It is seen as an affliction, which is the fault of both parents, even if one parent is bending over backwards to improve the parental conflict.  After all, it does not take two to tango if one of the dancers, is refusing to dance (in this context, engage in the necessary improvements to parental communication and, therefore, coparenting).  So what is the difference between this plague upon both your houses approach seen in parental conflict and that of a plague upon one house, being that of the parental alienator.  As I mentioned in part 2, in my view, it invariably, depends upon whether a parent has had the audacity to resist any prior judgement or expert report.  That was the case in OvC and directly led to the mother being ordered to have supervised contact and not even at a final hearing with all of the protections that natural justice supposedly brings to such hearings.

The FJC guidance is also defective in the sense that it states that psychological assessments should only happen after the court has made primary findings of planning. 

• First, there can be alienating behaviours, without any planning whatsoever. To refer to planning is to attribute intent or another state of mind that a lawyer has no expertise to do so. As I have mentioned, one can coach, manipulate and prime a child, completely without any intention to do so.

• Secondly, asking mental health professionals to opine on the case, with the knowledge of where the court has attributed blame, as a result of that fact-finding litigation, is problematic for the following reasons:
• The court-appointed mental health professional would not use legal documentation as a starting point for assessment. That is inconsistent with their diagnostic methodology. In particular, it may be that the “facts” and superficial behaviours are very different in terms of their causation and presentation, if seen through the prism of a mental health professional, as opposed to a legally qualified judge and yet we all know that experts are prohibited from usurping the decision-making of the judge.  This is the case prior to the facts in dispute being determined, let alone after they have been determined by a fact-finding hearing.
• That whatever is said about the court-appointed mental health professionals’ independence, they will be known by the court and derive a living from it, so it is best not to have a reputation of constantly undermining the opinions of one’s boss.

Accordingly, one can summarise the FJC guidance on parental alienation as simplistic, and ill informed on a number of levels.

The judgement in OvC does not explain why mother’s barrister thinks that Miss Gill would not have been a suitable expert now apart from her not being HCPC regulated and approaches her assessment through the narrow prism of attachment science.  The SRA are the solicitors’ regulator and yet they do not require family law solicitors to have any training in individuals and their emotions and psychology in conflict.  Whatever the limitations of looking at the mother’s difficulties through the prism of attachment science in Miss Gill’s report, the subsequent Cafcass reporter would not have been any more expert in any therapeutic or conflict resolution skill set.  So it would appear that whilst Miss Gill would not have been a suitable expert, the court’s answer is to take away all expertise because the Cafcass officer would have been neither expert (in any relevant discipline) or regulated by any governing body (to the extent that is relevant).

Further, quite what relevance it is that Miss Gill commented upon the case, no doubt under great provocation, in social media and otherwise is not explained.  I suspect that if she had confirmed the brilliance of the family justice system in, intuitively, knowing and resolving parental conflict and, therefore, extinguishing parental alienation, she would have been applauded not criticised.  Certainly, others have written on the subject.

I have already mentioned the rather ironic OvC paradox that in order to continue to impose supervision on the mother, the father was seeking to show that she was not a parental alienator, or at least that she was according to the superficial facts, as legally interpreted, but not according to Miss Gill’s more relevant skill set. 

Another “lucky guess” made by me in part 2 of this article is that the mother, did, in fact, make her own allegations of domestic abuse against the father.  On the basis that all of my guesses have been correct thus far, I strongly suspect that those allegations were not proved against the father, they were in all likelihood the product of unresolved negative emotion and negative beliefs regarding the father (i.e. parental conflict) rather than intentional abuse by the father. I do not need to know whether there was abuse or conflict.  If I had a pound for every parent who claimed abuse when, in actual fact, the issue was one of conflict, I would be a rich man.  Again, that has absolutely nothing to do with whether the impact of abuse is present.  It certainly can be even in conflict.  It is that impact that has to be understood and resolved.  Usually what happens is that individuals who are deeply upset and threatened by the other parent but who do not understand the dynamics of the conflict between them, relinquish all responsibility for the conflict and also fail to understand why they feel so upset.  In those circumstances, they look externally, rather than internally: it must be the other parent being abusive to them, when that is not the case.  So I do not know whether the father was abusing the mother or she interpreted it as such and neither does it matter.  What matters is that her perception of that abuse would be one reason for why she then alienated. Indeed, it does appear from the OvC judgement that the mother was portraying herself as a victim, unable to accept that she had any part to play in the difficulties that existed.  That is more likely to be a product of her upset and inability to take an objective view of her share of responsibility for the parental conflict.  However, in the absence of any such conflict resolution expertise, her behaviours will be seen as a reason why the mother would then intentionally alienate.  Quite simply, the two concepts do not follow.

The judgement also refers to the mother’s performance in the witness box.  That is another problem with the family justice system in that a parent’s credibility in explaining why they behaved they way they did (which is not even the primary concern of the OvC judgement, which refers to the superficial behaviours themselves) is under the most stressful circumstances of cross-examination in the witness box.  Ask any mental health professional whether that is the best way to take a case history.

Indeed, the judgement refers to the mother, consistently, making supportive gestures to promoting the child’s relationship with the father.  This type of inconsistency is completely to be expected where emotion rather than logic is operating in the parent’s mind.  However, in an environment of blame, even this type of inconsistency is at risk of being interpreted as manipulation or lack of credibility in the mother’s allegations of abusive behaviour by the father.

OvC confirms that the case of Re C is authority for the fact that whether parental alienation exists are factual matters for the judge and not diagnosis by an expert.  I cannot wait to read that judgement where every fact has at least 2 different interpretations, those who are interpreting them do not have all the requisite skill sets to do so through every possible prism, the truth of a particular fact, is to be proved on the balance of probabilities and is dependent upon how a parent performs in the witness box.  I could add another 10 variables to that because, after all, the law is a construct.  The truth of any fact is only as good as the minds, processes, diligence, expertise and many other factors operating to determine it.

In part 2 of my article, I have already given my opinion on whether, absent any expert understanding of the obvious parental conflict between the parents, any future court would be in a position to make decisions in relation to this family.  The judge in OvC said that the present issue was as follows:

What really matters for these children is for an investigation about the current situation so as to inform future welfare decisions, including, in particular, what sort of relationship that the children can have with their mother in the light of their own best interests, wishes and feelings, and the views and attitudes of the parents

However, in entrusting Cafcass and lawyers to that exercise (which resulted in the mother receiving unsupervised contact),

• The family was not subject to any expert assessment, whether the expert was regulated or not
• Any such assessment by Cafcass would not have been one based in understanding the reasons for and, therefore, how to improve the continuing welfare concern for the children, being that of parental conflict.
• This is even though the family had clearly suffered at the hands of the legal system by not receiving the right support during the last 5 years and, indeed, from the moment the parties separated and engaged the legal system, which had clearly failed the family and was continuing to do so understanding the significant resources it had applied to the problem. I doubt very much whether the parents felt any differently about each other than they did before litigation started. In fact, I suspect they feel even more polarised, with the children being caught in the middle.  In those circumstances, it will be interesting to see how Cafcass was able to check that the wishes and feelings of the children could be relied upon, particularly since their mother had been undermined in their eyes during their formative years.  It would be equally interesting to see what joint narrative was given to the children about this failure in the family justice system.  To put all of that on Ms Gill’s shoulders, as appears to be the case, seems to be a very clear case of scapegoating by the family justice system.

The Law Society Gazette article can be found at https://edition.pagesuite.com/html5/reader/production/default.aspx?pubname=&edid=445c50f3-d319-492e-85c4-cdfde5a2be6b&pnum=8&utm_source=gazette_newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Gazette+weekly+edition+24+Oct+2025_10%2f24%2f2025

O v C [2025] EWFC 334, which referred to an earlier judgement in those proceedings Re C (Parental Alienation: Instruction of Expert) [2023] EWHC 345.