Six Years Gone - What one family court case got devastatingly wrong, and what it means for how alienation cases are handled

In February this year, the President of the Family Division, Sir Andrew McFarlane, handed down one of the most significant family law rulings in years. It's called Re Y, and it's worth understanding properly, because it shows exactly how badly a family court process can go wrong, and how long it can take to put right.

The case began in 2019. Two parents, both making serious allegations against each other, including allegations of domestic abuse. The court initially planned to hold a fact-finding hearing, the process where a judge actually determines what happened. That hearing never took place.

Instead, before any facts were established, the court ordered an assessment into whether one parent, the mother, had alienated the children against the father. The expert who conducted that assessment concluded she had, and that it amounted to emotional abuse. On the strength of that opinion alone, the court cancelled the fact-finding hearing entirely, moved the children to live with their father, and effectively ended the mother's contact with them unless she accepted the findings and undertook therapy.

She had no meaningful relationship with her children for years.

Here's the detail that should stop anyone in their tracks: the expert who made that assessment was not a registered or chartered psychologist. Their opinion was nonetheless treated as authoritative enough to end a mother's relationship with her children, without a single one of the domestic abuse allegations in the case ever being tested in front of a judge.

Years later, with one child now an adult and the younger having left the father's home to go and live with the mother, the case came back before the President himself. His ruling was blunt: the original process was “fundamentally flawed.” Serious allegations were never properly investigated. An unqualified expert's opinion had been allowed to substitute for the court's own fact-finding role. And the concept of ‘alienation’ had been applied without the caution it demands, since a child rejecting a parent does not automatically mean the other parent caused it.

The earlier findings against the mother were set aside. The younger child was ordered to live with her, an order the judgment itself noted should probably have been made around six years earlier.

I want to be precise about what this case does and doesn't show. This isn't a story about family courts being biased against fathers, or against mothers. It's a story about what happens when a court skips the hard, necessary work of establishing facts and defers instead to an expert opinion, especially one from someone without the qualifications the role demands. That failure devastated a mother in this case. It could just as easily devastate a father in another, and very often does.

This is exactly the pattern I've written about before in a different context: when a system reaches a conclusion before it's finished gathering evidence, everyone loses, the parent wrongly found against, and the child caught in the middle of a process that was never properly tested in the first place.

If you're going through a family court dispute involving allegations of alienation or abuse, the lesson from this case is a hard one: ask whether the person giving expert evidence is actually qualified to do so and insist that serious allegations are properly investigated before any conclusions are reached about either parent. It shouldn't take six years and a ruling from the President of the Family Division to get that right.

If this is something you're living through right now, The Forgotten Fathers goes deeper into exactly this territory, what it actually looks like to fight for a relationship with your children inside a system that doesn't always get it right the first time.

I also cover parental alienation and family court process directly in my speaking and training work for organisations who need to understand these patterns properly, not just react to them.

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