Sarah Calvert, PHD, Clinical Psychologist, has worked for the New Zealand Family Court
since its inception. She has also worked for many years in various roles for Oranga Tamariki
(NZ’s statutory child welfare organisation). She was an expert witness for the NZ Royal
Commission into Abuse in State Care (2022). She has worked in private practice and as
an internationally recognised researcher in areas such as Child Development and women’s
mental health. In 2018 she was made a Distinguished Scholar of Waikato University in
recognition of her research and her clinical work. She authored a chapter on the value of
psychology in Family Court cases (Research Handbook on International Child Abduction,
Freeman and Taylor, 2023) and has a chapter in press, co-authored with her colleague
Trudy Ake MSW, Cultural Identity:‘Ko au te awa, ko te awa ko au’ - I am the river and the
river is me’ on the impor
tance of identity for child development which will appear
in Children and Young People’s Identities in International Law: Life Events, Law and
Selfhood. Freeman and Taylor (2025). She is a member of the AFCC/OFW Committee
preparing a Bench Book for the National Council of Juvenile and Family Court Judges (USA)
on the use of ACES in working in Family Courts.
Anne McKechnie is an independent consultant forensic and clinical psychologist with the
Scottish Child Abuse Inquiry. Her role there involves development and implementation of
a systemic trauma-informed approach to taking evidence from adults who were abused in
care as children. This approach is also applied to all those coming to give evidence,
including alleged and convicted abusers.
Until 2018, Anne worked for over 30 years with the National Health Service in Scotland,
specialising latterly in the impact and treatment of complex trauma and abuse in female
offenders.
During her career, Anne has served as psychology member of the Scottish Parole Board
and was a commissioner on the Time To Be Heard, the Scottish Government commissioned
pilot forum for survivors of In Care Abuse.
Anne frequently delivers teaching, training and consultation on the impact of trauma at all
levels and has a particular interest in the application of trauma-informed working and
leadership within legal organisations. In recent years, she has been consulted by NHS
Education Scotland in the development of the Justice Framework and is involved in the
delivery of trauma training to Judicial Officers in Scotland. This training is also to be
delivered to the European Judges Training Network later this year.
Aleisha Ebrahimi joined the Faculty of Laws in September 2018. Her PhD research focuses
on gender equality as a matter of international human rights law, with a focus on structural
inequality, domestic abuse and economic violence. Aleisha’s doctoral research combines
doctrinal and empirical methodologies, in order to consider the effect of law on society. In
September 2022, Aleisha was appointed as Senior Policy Advisor to the Domestic Abuse
Commissioner for England and Wales. In March 2023, she was invited by the Women and
Equalities Select Committee to act as an academic expert for a roundtable on International
Obligations & Violence Against Women and Girls. As part of her broader work on gender,
Aleisha researches and writes on the complexities of coercive control, post-separation
abuse and the intersection between the rights of women and children. Her research on
gender and law is supported by a UCL Faculty of Laws Research Scholarship, the UCL
Joseph Hume Scholarship and the prestigious Modern Law Review Scholarship (awarded
for both 2019-2020 and 2020-2021).
Aleisha is a Family Law Associate Lecturer (Teaching) at UCL’s Faculty of Laws and a
Lecturer at Sciences Po in Paris, France where she is convenor for her module ‘Gender and
International Human Rights Law’. As part of this module, Aleisha delivers content on
maternal rights, domestic violence, the role of UN human rights treaties and women in
times of war. She delivers specialist teaching on the causes and consequences of rape,
coercive control and economic violence.
She holds an LLB in European Law, having studied in both France, for a Licence en Droit
Européen, and the UK. She also holds an LLM in Transnational Law (Distinction) from
King’s College London. Aleisha was Called to the Bar as a Lord Lowry scholar and is a
member of the Honourable Society of Middle Temple. Prior to the civil service and
academia, Aleisha was at Amnesty International and worked on the United Nations 2015
Sustainable Development Goals, and before this was at the United Nations High
Commissioner for Refugees in London during the peak of the Syrian conflict in 2013.