‘It was easier to say mum was dead’: teen speaks out after court tore his family apart

Dylan* was taken away from his mother by the family courts when he was nine years old. Afterwards, he told people she had died. It was easier than trying to explain what had really happened.

The truth was that he and his sister were removed from her care without warning. They couldn’t bring any belongings with them and all contact with her was barred. Their mum wasn’t even allowed to send them birthday or Christmas cards.

What had she done to deserve it? During a custody dispute, an expert appointed by the family courts had decided Dylan’s mum had turned her children against their father – dismissing her allegations of abuse in the process. Not that Dylan knew this at the time. Instead, he was told that his mother was “mentally ill”.

After a six-year struggle to overturn the expert evidence, his mother, Erin*, was vindicated at a high court hearing in January. In the run-up to those proceedings, Dylan took matters into his own hands and ran away from his father’s house before hiring his own solicitor. Before Christmas, we reported on his emotional reunion with his mother.

Now back under her roof, Dylan – who recently turned 16 – is able to talk about his ordeal for the first time. “The environment at my dad’s was horrible and stressful and I’d had enough,” he explains. “The morning I left, everyone was out, so I was able to sneak out this massive duffel bag.”

His mother was at home when she heard the news. “I got a video call from a friend saying, ‘I’m with [Dylan]’, and she handed him the phone,” says Erin. “It was the first time I’d seen him in nearly six years. It was nuts. He said, ‘Hi mum, I’m coming home. We are 30 minutes away’.”

Erin is still getting used to having a teenager in the house: “It’s like when you first have a newborn and you have to figure it all out and adjust fast.”

“She’s figuring out how to be a mum again and I’m figuring out how to be a son,” says Dylan. “She has to parent a 16-year-old she’s only known for a few months. I’m a completely different person mentally and physically.”

They have a lot to catch up on but Erin has been trying to give her son space. “He will come and have a hug but he doesn’t want to talk about the sad stuff.”

‘Long history of abuse’

Erin met her ex-husband in spring 2006 and he proposed five weeks later. She was 22. He was in his 30s with a job in the City.

“He persuaded me to quit my job and move in with him,” she says. “Before I knew it his parents were throwing an engagement party. Things were snowballing and I thought, ‘I have to get out of this somehow’.”

Then she fell pregnant with Dylan’s sister. “I was in a state of panic. He was over the moon and railroaded me into a wedding ‘before I started to show’. I was young with no job or savings – it seemed like the best option.”

She claims the abuse started when she was still pregnant. “He would push and pinch me and drag me by the arms. One night he locked me in a walk-in wardrobe.

“Afterwards there would be calm periods where he would buy me clothes and handbags and take me on spa weekends.” Erin says. She adds: “I now recognise the behaviour for what it was but back then, nobody knew what coercive control meant.”

After Dylan was born in 2010, she tried to end the marriage. “That’s when he hit me properly for the first time,” she alleges . “I was breastfeeding the baby and he took him from me before punching me twice in the face and grabbing my jaw.”

“When I bit his hand, he started strangling me saying, ‘You’re not going to leave’. A neighbour must have heard; the next thing the police were banging on the door.”

Erin says her ex started crying and told the officers she had tried to kill herself. They were both arrested and gave different accounts of the incident. They were both later released without charge.

Police records seen by the Bureau state that Erin had visible bruising to her face and neck consistent with her allegations. But fearful of losing her home if he was convicted, she withdrew her cooperation from the police enquiries.

A “prolonged and sustained attack” on Boxing Day 2014 was the final straw, says Erin. She claims he tried to strangle her and pushed her down the stairs, leaving her needing medical care. “My daughter witnessed the attack – that was the tipping point.” She filed for divorce and he moved out.

Erin’s ex has consistently denied ever being abusive towards her or the children and there are no convictions or court findings against him.

For the next four years the children lived with her and saw their father 10 nights a month. “He travelled a lot and wouldn’t always take up contact,” she says, “but I never stopped him from seeing them.”

It wasn’t until 2018 that she disclosed the full history of the alleged abuse to police.

Then, in July that year, she received a letter. Her ex was filing for full custody of the kids because of “parental alienation” – the idea one parent has manipulated their child into rejecting the other.

The police advised her that addressing her allegations through the family courts would be quicker than pursuing a prosecution and that she’d be able to secure a protection order. “In my stunning naivety I believed them,” she says. “It’s hard to imagine how it could have gone any worse.”

Lengthy court battle

When the case reached the court, Erin presumed justice would be served. “I had all this evidence, the abuse had been going on for a decade. He’d been arrested. I thought, ‘This cannot be contested.’”

Erin’s ex continued to deny her allegations. He claimed Erin had neglected their kids and turned them against him.

The allegations ranged from “the banal to the absurd”, says Erin. “He said I would leave the children to go to sex parties, that I was an alcoholic and a sex worker. None of it was true.”

Initially, things seemed to be going well for Erin despite the fact her ex had hired expensive lawyers while she was mainly representing herself. But the case turned sharply in April 2019 when psychologist Melanie Gill was brought in. She was put forward by the Children and Family Court Advisory and Support Service (Cafcass), tasked with representing the interests of children in court.

Gill describes herself as “a highly specialised expert witness” and claims to have given evidence in up to 200 cases. But her work is entirely unregulated: she is not registered with the Health and Care Professions Council (HCPC). She is among a number of psychologists – including some who are regulated – who advise family judges on the now-discredited concept of “parental alienation”.

Gill says she is well-qualified to act as an expert witness in family proceedings and that she has years of specialist training and expertise. In a 2023 case, she told the court: “I have been challenged and questioned on my qualifications in every single private law case I have ever undertaken and I have never been criticised.”

For Erin’s case, Gill was paid about £16,000 to assess the family and produce a report. She asked each of the parents 800 questions. Erin recalls that “only three of them related to domestic abuse”. The psychologist then filed a 100-page assessment described by Erin’s barrister as “impossible to understand”.

Gill also interviewed both children. Dylan was eight when he first met her. To say she did not make a good impression would be an understatement. At the time he was constantly being pulled out of lessons to speak to an endless string of professionals.

“I became used to one-sided questions but nobody was as blunt as Gill in trying to get me to bad-mouth my mum,” he recalls. “I remember being shocked at how direct she was.”

They had several “upsetting” meetings, he says, with recording devices and a “camcorder right in my face”. “She would ask if mum had ever physically abused my dad. But there were no questions about his behaviour.”

On one occasion, he remembers, Gill asked what scared him. He replied “foxes” because one had recently attacked his pet cat. “Then she said ‘Are you sure you aren’t scared of mummy, are you scared when mummy drinks?’ But nobody ever asked me how I felt when my dad drank half a bottle of whisky in one night.”

Now Dylan says he believes the questions were aimed at “building a case against mum”. He adds: “I think Gill would get brought in because people with money wanted to get their own way and knew they could achieve that with her.”

Following her assessment, Gill told the court Erin was “projecting vengeful anger” against her ex and the children were being alienated from him as a result. “The report came in and all hell broke loose,” recalls Erin.

Without hearing from any other experts, District Judge Smith adopted Gill’s conclusions as the court’s findings – a decision that would later be heavily criticised by the high court.

He declined to examine the parents’ respective allegations of abuse, including accusations by Erin of physical assault and rape. Smith said there was no need for the court to determine the truth of the allegations because Gill had told him that, even if they were proved, it would not affect her recommendations.

Complaints from both children about their father (which he denies) – including a serious allegation of physical abuse by Erin’s daughter – were also overlooked.

On Gill’s advice, Smith ordered that the children must live with their father. Erin was to have no contact with them until she had undertaken a costly therapy. “Gill personally shut down any attempts I made to undertake the therapy unless it was with the person she had recommended,” says Erin.

That was in 2020. In January of this year, at a hearing in which the father declined to participate, the ruling was overturned by the most senior family court judge in England and Wales. His landmark judgment sets a precedent that effectively ends the use of unregulated experts like Gill in children’s proceedings.

Erin did not see or speak to either of her kids until January 2025, when her daughter, now 18, arrived on her doorstep out of the blue. She lived with Erin for six months before taking a job abroad and later returning to the UK.

Erin says: “Gill has caused such psychological trauma to so many children and families and she needs to be held accountable for what she has done.”

‘It was easier to say mum was dead’

The day he was taken from his mum in December 2019, Dylan knew she had a court hearing. But they were totally blindsided by what happened next. Instead of his mother collecting him from a friend’s house as expected, his father turned up and took him to the property he lived in with his new partner.

He was accompanied by a Cafcass officer. Dylan says: “She said mum was ‘mentally ill’ and that I’d be staying with dad. She called my mum ‘crazy’ and I got really angry, shouting at her to get out of my room.”

The weeks that followed were a blur: “I felt confused and empty and I shut down.” He stayed in his room watching YouTube and missed three weeks of school.

He says his father worked long hours and “was hardly at home and when he was I hated it”. While his dad never hurt him physically, Dylan claims he would get angry and shout. “He would drink excessively, break glasses and grit his teeth and growl.”

After a year, his father uprooted the family. Fed up of trying to explain his mother’s absence, Dylan constructed a lie. “I told people my mum was dead. It was easier than the whole sob story. I didn’t want people’s pity.”

For the first few years, Dylan really missed his mother. “I would ask to see her and dad would say she was mentally ill but I never believed a thing he said.” Around the age of 12, he “just gave up”.

“I genuinely believed she wasn’t coming back.”

Having not been listened to by professionals and after being presented with an account of his mother he did not accept, Dylan developed a general distrust of the adults in his life.

Time to heal

In November last year Dylan, then 15, ran away to see his mother. It was the first time they had seen each other in nearly six years. Police removed him from her property later that night and after refusing to return to his father he was placed in emergency foster care.

At an urgent court hearing it was decided that he should live with a family friend while having supervised contact with his mother. His first unsupervised visit was on Christmas Day. He is now living with her full-time.

Though he describes himself as antisocial, Dylan, who loves music and history, is charming and chatty. He enjoys gaming and going to the gym but says he is unlike other teenagers. “I’m not into getting drunk, having a girlfriend or hanging out with mates.”

In his newly painted bedroom Dylan’s old toys are proudly displayed among the usual teenage paraphernalia. He was surprised to find his mother had kept hold of his Lego, Transformers and a favourite childhood blanket.

“When [the children] were taken they weren’t allowed to retrieve any of their belongings, not even their favourite teddy,” says Erin. “I was told it would ‘emotionally destabilise’ them.”

Despite the long separation, the pair seem relaxed in each other’s company. They watch films together, talk about politics, and she’s been teaching him to cook.

It will take time to heal the damage caused by the systematic failures of the family justice system.

Dylan hopes that, in time, he will learn to trust people again. But it’s doubtful this will ever extend to his father. If the aim of the court ruling was to strengthen the bond between them, it’s been an abject failure. Dylan says they got on better before.

“Before the court proceedings, I used to enjoy spending time with him. But after he took me away from my mum I don’t have an ounce of love for him. I never want to see him again.”