14 October 2015
Judge: Stephen Cobb
Preceded by:
20 December 2011
Judge: Mark Hedley
31 July 2013
Judge: Stephen Cobb
Counsel for the fathers: Robin Tolson
[2013] EWHC 4150 (Fam)
20 December 2013
Judge: Stephen Cobb
20 March 2014
Judge: Stephen Cobb
The case involved Mark Berelowitz, Hamish Cameron and Karen Woodall.
27 January 2015
Judges: Andrew McFarlane, Patrick Elias, Richard McCombe
Reported in Family Law Week.
In ‘Greater than the mere sum of its parts’: coercive control and the question of proof, Adrienne Barnett of Brunel University criticizes Andrew McFarlane for failing to understand the cumulative, long term effects of coercive control and insisting instead on specific, serious incidents of violence.
18 February 2015
Judges: Jill Black, Eleanor King, David Keene
Barrister for the children’s guardian: Jessica Lee
23 February 2015
Judges: Kelly, Irvine, Hogan
Expert: Jim Sheehan
Judge: Miranda Robertshaw
Expert: Mark Berelowitz
An “alienated” mother was refused permission to instruct “‘parental alienation expert’, KW” (Karen Woodall).
Re P and Q (Children: Care Proceedings: Fact Finding) [2015] EWFC 26 (Fam)
19 March 2015
Judge: Anna Pauffley
Barrister: June Venters
The mother, Ella Draper, and her new partner, Abraham Christie, accused the father of ritual satanic sexual abuse of the children and of sexual abuse and murder of other children. Sabine McNeill acted as Draper’s McKenzie Friend. The allegations were entirely fabricated, and the fathers’ rights movement was jubilant. The case was widely reported, including in the Daily Mail.
Regina v McNeill [2019] EWCA Crim 1566
Accused: The Hampstead Paedophile Hoax, Channel 4, 11 March 2024
22 April 2015
Judge: Miranda Robertshaw
Expert: Mark Berelowitz
Mother insisted on having parental alienation expert “KW” [Karen Woodall] from the Family Separation Clinic instructed, but the judge refused permission.
Judge: Clifford Bellamy
Judge ordered boy to be placed in foster care due to parental conflict and damaging immersion into the mother’s Jehovah’s Witness faith.
Expert: Paul Livock
Rebecca Minnock v Roger Williams
Judge: Stephen Wildblood
Expert: Mark Berelowitz
VS13 P00027 8 June 2015
Links to all the Minnock judgements
C (A Child) [2015] EWCA Civ 539
10 June 2015
Earlier judge: Richard Scarratt
Appeal judges: Richard Aikens, Patrick Elias, Ernest Ryder
Family Law Hub: “Appeal by father in private law proceedings, against order requiring he be subject to a psychological report and pay half the costs. Appeal allowed because, broadly, the court and judge on appeal had ignored the current Rules on experts that came into force in 2013.”
17 June 2015
Judges: Andrew McFarlane, Stephen Richards, Christopher Clarke
Withers Worldwide, Parental alienation: surely the time has come to effect change? 19 May 2016
15 July 2015
Stuart Graham, acting as the “alienated” father’s McKenzie friend, sought the imprisonment of two Cafcass officers and the mother’s solicitors for their perceived failings after the father was granted only indirect contact with his daughter. Mrs Justice Roberts concluded that “Given the clear objectives which lay at the heart of these applications, as those objectives were articulated to me by Mr Graham, I consider the applications constituted an abuse of the court process.”
28 July 2015
Judges: Patrick Elias and Eleanor King
15 September 2015
Judges: Jill Black, previously Jane Evans-Gordon
Transfer of residence
14 August 2015
Judge: Damien Lochrane - openly gay
Daily Telegraph: Christian ruled too sexist to care for his daughter
“A Father who went to court in an attempt to force his 16-year-old daughter to leave her mother to live with him so that he could instil in her his traditional Christian values has had his case rejected by a judge who suggested he was a sexist throwback to another age.
Judge Damien Lochrane said the man, who cannot be identified, had demonstrated an “antediluvian attitude towards women” and appeared to believe they were incapable of making “sensible” decisions on their own.
The father also demonstrated an “arrogant” disregard for the teenager’s own wishes after she made it clear she did not want to live with him.
It was, the judge said, “difficult to imagine” how the man, from Cheshire, functioned in 21st-century Britain “while harbouring such attitudes”.
The judge detailed how the father, a successful professional, wanted the girl to move hundreds of miles away from her mother.
He wanted to take over responsibility for her education, teach her about her paternal heritage and promised he would “ensure that she goes to church”. The judge said the mother and father were never involved in a “proper relationship and that the father had never played a part in his daughter’s care”.
Judge Lochrane said the girl did not share her father’s traditional Christian beliefs and was adamant that she wanted to stay with her mother.
But the father was, the judge said, convinced the girl’s mother was poisoning her mind against him.
She had written her father an “anguished” letter, explaining her feelings on the issue but the father “could not even bring himself to consider it on any remotely sensitive level”.
Instead, he “arrogantly dismissed it” as the handiwork of the girl’s mother, the judge said.
Judge Lochrane said the father was “quite incapable of meeting this child’s needs” and remarked that bringing the case had been clearly against the teenager’s best interests. “He has demonstrated by his approach and his answers that he has what can most charitably be described as an antediluvian attitude towards women, their role in a properly ordered household and their ability to make sensible decisions of any importance for themselves,” he said.
“It is difficult to imagine how he has sustained an apparently thriving [professional] practice in 21st-century Britain while harbouring such attitudes.”
He added: “He has shown himself at best obdurate in his refusal to accept the blindingly obvious.
“At worst he has sacrificed a good portion of the relationship he might otherwise have had with his daughter on the altar of his vain and arrogant refusal to afford due respect to the divergent views of his female child.”
If the court ordered the girl to move in with a father she considered “emotionally distant”, the teenager would in all probability refuse to do so, he remarked. “The emotional trauma which this child would suffer by taking such a course should, in my judgment, be absolutely plain to even the most emotionally myopic.”
The judge dismissed the father’s application.”
29 September 2015
Judges: James Munby, Nicholas Underhill, Robert Hildyard
16 November 2015
Hague Convention dispute involving parental alienation allegations by both sides, proven domestic violence, Bulgaria.
Judge: Stephen Cobb
F (Children) [2015] EWCA Civ 1315
26 November 2015
Alienated mother
26 November 2015
Judge: Simon Wood