Introduction
Child protection is one of the most intrusive legal systems of the state (Fong Reference Fong2020). It constitutes the justifications and mechanisms by which the state enters the most private sphere—the family home and familial relationships—with the openly declared intention of reshaping them (Ben-Arieh Reference Ben-Arieh2014). In Israel, these interventions are structured primarily through the Youth Law (Care and Supervision) and adjudicated in the specialized juvenile courts.Footnote 1 While these courts are formally administrative in nature, they are uniquely empowered to suspend parental custody and to authorize far-reaching welfare plans, including the permanent removal of children from their families (Davidson-Arad et al. Reference Davidson-Arad, Englechin-Segal, Wozner and Gabriel2003). This article examines how these courts conceptualize and respond to child neglect and, in particular, how they treat the persistent presence of poverty in the lives of the families who appear before them.
The empirical record shows that poverty is everywhere in these proceedings. Social workers’ reports detail apartments without electricity or running water, insufficient food, children required to work to supplement the family income, and parents forced to choose between long shifts and childcare. Parents themselves raise these circumstances in their testimony, often pleading for material support. This is consistent with reports of other jurisdictions, in which poverty is a major element in child protection cases and interventions (Slack et al. Reference Slack, Holl, McDaniel, Yoo and Bolger2004; Duva, Metzger, and Guggenheim Reference Duva, Metzger and Guggenheim2010; Maguire-Jack and Font Reference Maguire-Jack and Font2017). Yet, strikingly, these facts are not treated as the causes of neglect. On the contrary, court actors consistently deny that poverty can explain why a child is at risk. The recurring message is that “good parents” ought to manage material scarcity. In this way, poverty is acknowledged as background but excluded as explanation, and, therefore, no systematic response attempts to address poverty, instead focusing on addressing parental failure. The problem is not systemic deprivation; it is individual incapacity. As one social worker bluntly told me when I explained my research puzzle, “poverty has nothing to do with it.”
This denial is analytically significant. It reveals a mode of legal reasoning that transforms structural conditions into personal failings, thereby legitimating state intervention while obscuring the role of poverty itself (Roberts Reference Roberts1999; Gupta Reference Gupta2017; Pasian, Benitez, and Lacharité Reference Pasian, Benitez and Lacharité2020, Naveed Reference Naveed2022). Whereas sociological and social work literatures recognize poverty as a structural determinant of neglect (Dubowitz et al. Reference Dubowitz, Black, Starr and Zuravin1993; Hildyard and Wolfe Reference Hildyard and Wolfe2002; Runyan et al. Reference Runyan, Cox, Dubowitz, Newton, Upadhyaya, Kotch, Leeb, Everson and Knight2005), legal scholarship has tended to bracket it out. Furthermore, in an attempt to refute criticism of the state’s use of child protection as a justification for punishing and policing families who belong to marginalized groups (Enosh and Topilsky Reference Enosh and Topilsky2014; Fong Reference Fong2020; Ulitsa et al. Reference Ulitsa, Yona, Gogonsky, Roer-Strier, Roer-Strier and Nadan2020; Polikoff and Spinak Reference Polikoff and Spinak2021; Lee Reference Lee2022; Roberts Reference Roberts2022; Webb Reference Webb2022), child protection systems go to great lengths to refrain from acknowledging the fact that most of their “clients” are, indeed, families in poverty.
What has been missing are ethnographic accounts that capture how courts themselves sustain this erasure in practice. This article seeks to fill that gap. It conceptualizes this dynamic as a feature of “criministrative law.” “Criministrative law” refers to administrative legal forums that adopt criminal-style logics and rituals—such as adversarial seating, plea-like exchanges, and individualized blame—while still operating under administrative deference to agencies, thereby withholding the protections of both criminal and administrative law (Cohen-Rimer Reference Cohen-Rimer2024). Adopting this rationale, the state and the legal system blame families for the poverty in which they find themselves and blame poor parenting for the hardships of children brought up in poverty. What is more, due to the sweeping denial of the fact that structural poverty is the actual issue before the courts, criministrative law leads to “legal gaslighting,” a term I use to describe institutional framings that deny or mask punitive effects by recoding them as care/compliance.
In the present case study, it is the juvenile courts, child welfare law, and child protection services of Israel that are examined as illustrative examples of criministrative systems. However, the harms incurred by individuals and society, more broadly, as a result of the de facto criministrative character of such systems are a source of concern worldwide. Growing criticism along these lines is slowly starting to be voiced in the legal scholarship, mainly through the works of Dorothy Roberts (Reference Roberts1995, Reference Roberts1999, Reference Roberts2022), Wendy Bach (Reference Bach2022), and Anna Arons (Reference Arons2022, Reference Arons2023). More critical scholarship can be found outside the legal literature, wherein the issue was identified and critically discussed much earlier (Dubowitz et al. Reference Dubowitz, Black, Starr and Zuravin1993; Soss, Fording, and Schram Reference Soss, Fording and Schram2011; Gupta Reference Gupta2017; W. Elliott Reference Elliott2018). By documenting the criministrative behavior of the court actors, the article offers an empirical contribution, comprising rare ethnographic access to Israeli juvenile courts; a conceptual one, clarifying the hybrid legal form; and a normative one, proposing the poverty-aware paradigm (PAP) as an alternative lens through which to understand and address child neglect (Lister Reference Lister2013; Krumer-Nevo Reference Krumer-Nevo2020, Reference Krumer-Nevo2022).
Before turning to the specific legal framework of Israeli juvenile courts, it is useful to situate this study within broader socio-legal scholarship on how poverty is addressed and enacted in courtrooms. Socio-legal research has long examined how courts translate structural inequalities into individualized narratives. In US criminal courts, for example, Matthew Clair (Reference Clair2020) shows how class and race shape outcomes not only through formal procedures but also through everyday discourse and assessments of indigency. In welfare and administrative contexts, Vicki Lens (Reference Lens2012) highlights how administrative law judges exercise discretion in ways that transform claims of social need into judgments of compliance and deservingness. At the same time, work on courtroom interaction has underscored how “othering” occurs symbolically and linguistically. Torun Elsrud (Reference Elsrud2014) demonstrates how interpreter-assisted hearings in European courts generate threats to self-presentation and reinforce asymmetries between legal actors and lay participants. These insights resonate with the present study’s findings on “procedural othering,” where courtroom choreography and discourse, as well as translation and linguistic issues, marginalize parents’ voices.
Building on this scholarship, the present article analyzes Israeli juvenile courts at a micro-to-meso level: tracing how everyday talk, spatial arrangements, and documentary practices enact the criminalization of poverty within an administrative forum. This approach situates the findings not only within welfare and child protection literature but also in broader law-and-society conversations about how poverty is made legible—and punishable—through court processes.
Legal background: Israeli child Protection law and the Juvenile Courtroom
In today’s Israeli legal framework, the law that constructs proceedings in the juvenile courts was introduced in 1960 as part of a reform of the previous law addressing “juvenile delinquents” (Hassin Reference Hassin2011). The law governing at-risk children and protection matters—the Youth (Care and Supervision) Law—added to the grounds for state intervention in the lives of minors and framed the social worker as the lead figure in this intervention rather than the probation officer. This law was later complemented, with amendments, by the Youth Law (Adjudication, Penalizing and Manners of Treatment).Footnote 2 These two pieces of legislation brought together all the laws discussed exclusively in the juvenile courts—a special branch of magistrates’ courts. Unlike ordinary magistrates, who rotate across a wide docket of civil and criminal cases, juvenile judges are appointed to dedicated positions and develop specialized expertise in child protection law. Hence, judges in the juvenile courts hear both the “civil,” care-related cases (called in Hebrew “destitution cases”) and criminal cases involving minors.
Importantly, while the kinds of parental behaviors that are typically reprimanded in the public discourse constitute what the law terms “abuse,” most of the cases dealt with in the child protection system—whether through the welfare system or through the courts—are legally classified as “neglect” (Hildyard and Wolfe Reference Hildyard and Wolfe2002; Runyan et al. Reference Runyan, Cox, Dubowitz, Newton, Upadhyaya, Kotch, Leeb, Everson and Knight2005). However, the definition of this crucial term remains vague and open to interpretation. In practice, determinations of neglect are often—though not always—established and reaffirmed through the interpretive work of courts and professionals. For this reason, a thorough understanding of how decisions are made regarding neglect is crucial.
In the civil cases heard by the court, it is the mandatory social worker (who is known in Hebrew as the “social worker of the law”), appointed by the law to handle such procedures, who sets forth a case proving the child’s “destitution,” together with a formal plan devised by the Welfare Department to address the child’s needs. The classification of the child as “destitute”—in need of care—constitutes a de facto revocation of their parents’ legal custody. While the physical custody can remain intact, with the first stages of intervention being performed while the child continues to live at home, the legal decision-making authority of the parents is temporarily suspended, and the court—in fact, the state—steps in as the custodian of the child. Following the formal recognition of destitution, a social worker suggests an action plan, which the court approves, and then grants legal power (after amending it, if needed) on the basis of the submitted opinions of all parties to the case: the parents, the welfare authorities, and the child. The child’s opinion is voiced through a court-appointed guardian ad litem, a professional tasked with advocating for the minor’s best interests and supporting them in court for the duration of the case (Cohen-Rimer Reference Cohen-Rimer2025). The court order indicating such destitution is temporary but can only be lifted by a judge. Each case of this kind is usually reviewed by the court only in annual hearings (although this can happen more frequently, if needed), and the order is not removed unless/until the judge is satisfied that it is no longer in the child’s best interest to be recognized as being in need of the state’s care.
Israeli law recognizes seven possible situations that justify a court order on the grounds of destitution. All of them leave a wide scope for the social worker and the judge to use their discretion in asserting the best interest of the child. While, legally, establishing destitution and devising an action plan are two separate issues, the recommended action plan proposed by the social workers can, and does, affect the court’s decision to issue a destitution order. The action plans vary and range from subjecting families to ongoing home visits by a social worker or obligatory parenting classes and substance-abuse detox programs to removing the child and ordering a temporary placement or a more permanent out-of-home facility. Children above the age of twelve, as a rule, are present in the courtroom when neglect cases are heard, except in the rare cases that they do not wish to attend. As this is their one opportunity to have a say in the decision that will determine their fate, they generally do ask to be there—often to express their wish to be allowed to stay with the family unit. They travel either from home with their parents (or with the parent they live with, in the case of a separated couple) or from the facility where they were previously placed by the court or by the welfare agency taking the emergency measures. This could be an interim hostel, a state-run (or state-monitored) boarding school or secure facility, or a mental health institution.
It is important to note that the proceedings in the courtroom do not cover all state actions concerning children at risk (Hassin Reference Hassin2011; Reichenberg Reference Reichenberg, Marrus and Laufer-Ukeles2021, Reference Reichenberg2024). The Welfare Department’s rules (applied de facto as welfare law in Israel since no such general law exists) delegate authority to the mandatory social worker, who is appointed by the Welfare Ministry, to conduct inquiries into any minor who is seemingly at risk of neglect or abuse (Lee Reference Lee2016; Mack Reference Mack2021). If such a risk is confirmed by the social worker, they are required to propose an action plan for the family. The resulting plan in those situations is devised by a “Treatment and Care Committee,” comprising representatives from the Welfare Department and the family unit, including the child. According to the law, only if the family refuses to sign off on the recommended plan drafted by the committee will the case reach the juvenile court (Hassin Reference Hassin2011; Reichenberg Reference Reichenberg, Marrus and Laufer-Ukeles2021). Research suggests that agreement to plans in these committees is often accompanied by the risk of pressure, fear of retaliation, and a lack of resources and knowledge of alternatives and that caution should therefore be exercised when framing them in terms of “free consent” (Hassin Reference Hassin2011; Leviner Reference Leviner2014; Kumor Reference Kumor2021). This institutional design is central to my argument: it demonstrates how wide discretionary power is delegated to social workers, setting the stage for courts to defer to welfare agencies and to treat neglect as an interpretive construct.
These features of Israeli child protection law reveal both the specificity of the Israeli framework and the broader challenge of how neglect is defined. The next section turns to the PAP, which is a theoretical approach that offers a counterpoint to prevailing legal framings and a lens for rethinking neglect in structural rather than individual terms.
An antidote to “fixing the poor”?: the PAP
The minors and their families that are seen in the juvenile courts are overwhelmingly from backgrounds marked by poverty (Budd Reference Budd2010; Lee Reference Lee2016; Gupta Reference Gupta2017; Fong Reference Fong2020; Pasian, Benitez, and Lacharité Reference Pasian, Benitez and Lacharité2020; Lavender Reference Lavender2021; Bach Reference Bach2022; Naveed Reference Naveed2022; Ismail Reference Ismail2023). Nonetheless, the language of the law does not refer to poverty, and, as the findings of this inquiry will show, the professionals within the juvenile courtroom commonly reject the premise that families in poverty account for most of the “clientele” of the courts. In the standard narrative that they adopt, it is solely the incapability of the parents that has led to the court’s intervention. This attempt at ignoring poverty and focusing on individual responsibility has been found in other child protection systems, too, beyond Israel (see A. Elliott Reference Elliott2021; Bach Reference Bach2022; Roberts Reference Roberts2022; Cohen-Rimer Reference Cohen-Rimer2024).
In this article, I contend that there is a profound need for the PAP to be adopted at the intersection where child welfare and the juvenile court meet (Krumer-Nevo Reference Krumer-Nevo2020, Reference Krumer-Nevo2022). Originally developed for the social work realm, the PAP is an invaluable tool for analyzing the realities of the child protection system. Conceptually, it was designed to frame and discuss how social workers can better assist service users, but some early studies have already applied it to examine issues in the legal sphere (Krumer-Nevo Reference Krumer-Nevo2022; Cohen-Rimer Reference Cohen-Rimer2023). The PAP is critical in its school of thought, perceiving poverty as a violation of human rights and insisting on developing the theoretical discourse of agency while simultaneously engaging in agency-based practice (Lister Reference Lister2020). Paradigmatically, Michal Krumer-Nevo (Reference Krumer-Nevo2020, 19) understands people living in poverty as “agents who resist poverty under conditions of severe lack of economic and symbolic capital.” Within this framing, the epistemology underlining practice is critical and relational, whereby information regarding preferred intervention and strategy is obtained through an ongoing dialogue with the welfare service users themselves (including children and young people), with an emphasis on recognition and solidarity.
As the PAP was conceived out of the theoretical frameworks of the social work field, it suggests additions to the structural analysis of poverty on the ontological level, the epistemological level, and the axiological level. While material scarcity is recognized as a fundamental characteristic of poverty’s definition, and the structural-exclusionary aspect is recognized in some disciplines, the PAP adds the conceptualization of poverty as relational. This understanding emphasizes the social webs in which the person in poverty functions in everyday activities and stresses the importance of the connections and social interactions that they are maintaining as opposed to perceiving them as atomistic individuals acting in isolation (for a similar move in a different field of law, see Dagan and Dorfman Reference Dagan and Dorfman2018; Dagan Reference Dagan, Bant, Barker and Degeling2020). According to this view, people in poverty are constantly interacting and resisting poverty in relationship, albeit unsuccessfully in terms of escaping it altogether. In this sense, the PAP corresponds with the idea of relational equality, developed by Elizabeth Anderson (Reference Anderson1999) and others (Mosse Reference Mosse2010; Vitale Reference Vitale2022), which emphasizes the importance of “interrelation” — situated in the specific needs and background of the individual—and shifts the focus away from “technical” equality.
Building on this relational approach and the importance it attributes to recognition, the PAP paints an epistemologically complex view, in which knowledge is always partial and positional. In our legal context, such a view would lend more weight to the point of view of the child, not only because expressing their opinion can be good for their self-esteem or empowerment but also as a result of a sincere acknowledgment of the fact that their positional knowledge (of their best interest, of their options) is valuable. In the PAP, experience and life knowledge are respected, and attention is paid to the understanding that the process of knowledge production is political.
The axiology of the PAP is that of solidarity and empathy. It calls for standing with people who are living in poverty in their battle to resist structural discrimination and overcome “othering” public discourses and practices. Broadly speaking, the PAP shifts a social worker’s end goal, outlook, and attitude vis-à-vis their clients. It can be understood to be asking professionals to move from a state of mind that can be phrased as “fixing the poor” to one that can be articulated as “standing alongside people living in poverty in their struggle for social justice” (Krumer-Nevo Reference Krumer-Nevo2020, Reference Krumer-Nevo2022).
Let us now turn to the methodology adopted in the present inquiry and, thereafter, the findings from the field study undertaken in Israeli juvenile courts.
Methodology
This study employs focused ethnography in seven Israeli juvenile courts. Focused ethnography is particularly suited for institutional settings that are difficult to access and where extended immersion is not possible (Knoblauch Reference Knoblauch2005; Paik and Harris Reference Paik, Harris, Copes and Mitchell Miller2015). The method allows for intensive, short-term observation while attending to interactional detail, courtroom choreography, and the production of institutional discourse. This approach was strategic: Israeli juvenile courts are closed to the public, and access is rarely granted. Concentrated ethnographic observation offered a way to capture how neglect hearings unfold in real time and how legal actors frame and respond to families (see also Lens Reference Lens2012).
Participants, sample, and recruitment
Fieldwork was conducted throughout 2024 and included the observation of forty-five neglect hearings across seven juvenile courts, in the courtroom of eleven out of the eighteen active judges in the Israeli juvenile system.Footnote 3 Notes were taken by hand during hearings—recording was prohibited—and transcribed immediately afterwards into detailed field notes. These notes documented spoken interaction, seating arrangements, the sequencing of testimony, and the affective tenor of the exchanges. In addition, I observed corridor conversations and other informal interactions that often contextualized what occurred in the courtroom itself. Together, these records trace both the formal and informal dimensions of juvenile court practice.
Alongside courtroom observation, I conducted informal background interviews with judges, social workers, guardians ad litem, and attorneys. These conversations were not structured but typically began with questions about the role of the interviewee in court, their views on neglect, and the challenges they saw in balancing family autonomy and child protection. Crucially, I did not frame questions in terms of “poverty,” which makes the consistent absence of poverty as a structural explanation especially notable. Instead, interviewees themselves brought up economic conditions but almost always as evidence of parental failure rather than systemic deprivation.
Following the required approval from academic and judicial authorities, the sample of seven juvenile courts was identified, representing a geographically and socially varied cross-section: rural and urban; bigger (with three or four permanent judges) and smaller instances (one juvenile judge visiting once a week); and jurisdictions including predominantly Jewish or predominantly Arab (Israeli Palestinian) populations. For the sake of anonymity, the full list of courts observed cannot be disclosed. The observations related exclusively to “welfare cases”—civil cases regarding child neglect and abuse—even though, in most courts, the hearing day also covers criminal cases heard by the judge in the scheduled order or sometimes in accordance with urgency.
In addition to the site observations, I engaged in several non-structured background conversations with experts in the field, including former judges, academic scholars, and principal figures in the specific legal aid unit in charge of supervising and training guardians ad litem. Written materials were also reviewed including court decisions, where available (in higher instances in appeal decisions); the information provided for guardians ad litem on the Legal Aid website;Footnote 4 the Legal Aid training program content; and policy papers submitted by the unit as part of the legislating processes with regard to out-of-home placement, the support available in Palestinian communities, and the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on child welfare proceedings. Those materials provided background and context for the analysis of the field notes.
Research instrument and data collection
Inside the courtrooms, no electronic devices were permitted, but the research observations were logged in a handwritten field journal, as is common practice in focused ethnography research (Knoblauch Reference Knoblauch2005; Emerson, Fretz, and Shaw Reference Emerson, Fretz and Shaw2011). During the hearings, the journal meticulously recorded what was said (as much as possible) and other observations, such as the physical descriptions of the parties, the layout of the room, the personal perceptions of the atmosphere therein, and notes on the parties’ demeanor, tone, style, and emotions in their interactions. Legal data for each hearing were also logged, including the parties present, the hearing’s legal cause, and the length of the hearing.
Data analysis
In-process memos were used to identify and develop analytical themes (Emerson, Fretz, and Shaw Reference Emerson, Fretz and Shaw2011). The handwritten field notes, once typed up following each hearing, were analyzed using the thematic analysis method to identify and organize themes and patterns (Fitzgerald and Graham Reference Fitzgerald and Graham2011). Fieldnotes and interview transcripts were coded thematically using Atlas.ti, a qualitative analysis software that enables researchers to organize, code, and retrieve segments of textual data systematically. Themes were identified in an iterative process of reading transcripts, coding data, and subsequent analysis in relation to the broader literature concerning the theoretical framework.
Ethics
The research was approved by the Hebrew University Ethics Committee (Approval no. 2024HLE012) and the Israeli court management’s Research Department. Pursuant to the conditions upon which the study was approved, verbal consent was requested by each participant—children, parents, social workers, and lawyers/guardians ad litem—before each hearing commenced. In addition to the verbal consent, a note recording my presence as a researcher was introduced into the protocol of the hearing. All identifying details were anonymized. Following best practice in ethnography, quotations presented here are drawn from contemporaneous fieldnotes and anonymized to protect confidentiality. In a small field such as the Israeli juvenile courts, even minimal identifiers can compromise anonymity, so some contextual details have been altered without changing the substantive meaning. Quoted speech in double quotation marks denotes utterances recorded in fieldnotes during hearings or corridor observations. Brackets indicate anonymization or clarifications.
My professional background as a legal scholar shaped both my access and my interpretive lens. While my training facilitated entry into the courtroom and rapport with legal actors, I was attentive to the asymmetries between my position and that of the families observed. A reflexive awareness of this positionality informed both my observations and my analysis. I was upfront as to my presence in the courts and my research interest, and, instead of masking my interest in dynamics and relations within the courts and the relevance of poverty to the courts’ cases, I used reflexive analysis to check for personal biases interfering with the analysis as well as peer discussions and presentations of initial findings.
Findings: poverty and (only) its shadows in the juvenile courts
The analysis is presented in three parts. I begin with how poverty itself is made visible in the hearings, before showing how this visibility is simultaneously disqualified or denied as a legally relevant explanation. Only then do I turn to the criministrative mechanisms through which this denial is enacted in practice, particularly the procedural othering of parents and the responsibilization of their conduct. This sequence reflects the logic of the proceedings themselves: poverty appears, is stripped of structural meaning, and is then reframed through courtroom practices that cast parents as individually culpable. The discussion of the findings will be followed by some thoughts on how the PAP could potentially deliver some actual improvements to the answers given in response to families’ and children’s needs. In particular, this paradigm may be ideally placed to alleviate the legal gaslighting and epistemic hierarchy caused by the practices and procedures within criministrative law.
A court for poor families: impoverished clients, impoverished system
Among the forty-five families observed, all of the families but one were represented by legal aid. The exception—a middle-class household—is discussed below as a contrast case. This is unsurprising since, even though there is no universally agreed legal definition of the term “child neglect,” the formal construction of it in Israel (for example, on the Welfare Department’s website)Footnote 5 focuses on outward indicators of material deprivation: poor hygiene, clothes that are changed infrequently or inappropriate for the season, low weight, missed schooling or doctors’ appointments, and so on. While it would be prudent to assume that some of these outward signs can be the result of emotional neglect or child cruelty even in the wealthiest of families, it appears to be almost exclusively economically disadvantaged children who are picked up by the child protection legal radar.
In-court observation showed how material poverty surfaces in the courtroom, starting with one social worker’s request to formally declare the child “destitute.” In one hearing, this prompted a frustrated response from the parent, who asked: “About this label, how does it help me? Underwear, socks, that’s why I approached the local Welfare Office, but sometimes there are ears that do not hear.” Another pleaded with the social worker: “You’re paying tons of money to [send our child to] the boarding school! Help us with this money instead!” Poverty and material scarcity were prevalent also in the backstories that people shared in court, even when not expressed in their arguments directly. A teenage boy asking to be released from the institution where he was living temporarily, in order to return to the custody of his mother, emphasized that he was working “and could help her, financially.” His grandfather also added: “I have secured housing for them; I can drive them when needed.” A teenage girl who had been forcefully removed from her home mentioned that she had had to work to bring money into the household since she was twelve. A mother, explaining her situation to her lawyer, claimed that, as she had no choice but to go out to work full-time, she was forced to take her eldest daughter out of after-school activities to take care of her little brother because she could not afford private childcare.
Material poverty also featured strongly in the reports of the Welfare Department that were presented to the courts. For instance, in one family that was disconnected from the utilities due to non-payment, there was no water in the home, leading a child to be reported by the school because of their evidently poor hygiene and body odor. In one case, the social worker’s report stated that there was not enough furniture in the house; in another, it was reported that “the house is in a terrible condition, there is not a chair to sit on.” In yet another, it was observed that the house smelled bad or that the child was stealing food from the boarding school, “supposedly since there is not enough food at the home.” The parents described in these reports are generally unemployed or have lower-strata jobs such as cleaning or working in grocery stores. Sometimes, they work night shifts to make ends meet—a point mentioned in the Welfare Department’s reports because this parental working pattern means that the children are left alone at night.
The fact that the juvenile court is a court for poor families is so quotidian—so obvious to the professionals working there—that they openly address it in their “corridor conversations” and among themselves. One lawyer representing a mother told me: “Juvenile abuse and neglect cases in the rich families surface only during divorce, and then they get to the family courts.” A judge said (in-between hearings, in the presence of lawyers, social workers, and myself): “We see mainly material neglect. Emotional neglect is very hard to find, and also it is found in better places [wealthier neighborhoods], so they don’t look for it.” The fact that, within this ethnographic sample, parents who were represented were always represented by a public lawyer is also telling, as the rules of legal aid eligibility provide representation only to families living under the poverty line.
The financial vulnerability of the families is further echoed by the impoverishment of the very system meant to offer solutions to their hardships. Social workers and judges repeatedly expressed frustration at the lack of resources available to assist the families standing before them. Reports detailing children’s needs—produced by professionals with privileged insight, such as social workers, teachers, or medical practitioners—were routinely left unaddressed by the system. Several recurring factors contributed to this pattern. Waiting lists for appointments with relevant medical professionals were often extremely long. Placement shortages meant that siblings were frequently separated, even against professional recommendations. Institutional homes regularly operated at full capacity so that, when parents voiced concerns about a particular facility, they were told no alternative placement was available. Delays of months were common when a child was deemed ready to transition from an institutional home to foster care or when removal from an unsuitable foster placement was necessary. For these reasons, even when children’s needs were clearly identified and poverty was well documented, the system often produced “solutions” that were lamentably inadequate.
The negation of poverty: always and only individual responsibility
In stark contrast to the material circumstances that assailed virtually all the families observed in court, the professionals there—the judges, social workers, and lawyers—all focused, without exception, on the individual responsibility of the parents as the issue that had led to the neglect. This is the core approach in the court, from which stems the perception that the court protects children from their parents, fragmenting the family in poverty instead of addressing the material needs of the children. In explaining a case to me following a heated debate in the courtroom, one judge commented: “Here you see a case of poverty leading, unintentionally, to neglect, but you cannot transfer all responsibility of child upbringing to the state!” In yet another instance, a social worker said, flatly: “Poverty has nothing to do with it. We’re looking for parental capability.”
The “individual responsibility” stick that is used by the state to beat parents can be found in how they are treated by the court when they are criticized or even complimented. One social worker described the mother thus: “She had gotten herself together in the last year, we are very proud of her, but she is incapable of responding to the child’s needs.” Repeated remarks about the parents’ seeming disregard for the legal procedures also reflected apparent personal character flaws: “The mother claims she has no money to travel to the court for the hearing”; “the parents missed hearings, not wanting to skip a day at work.” Parents who expressed a desire to move away from the city they lived in, due to housing prices, were told that they needed to demonstrate their understanding of the severity of the process and “get their priorities straight.”
Following this individual-blame narrative, the conclusions of a “neglect” hearing are translated into the court’s written recommendations and next steps for the parents to take, captured in what is termed a “treatment plan.” Note, here, the terminology, which is more resonant of some kind of unsavory but curable condition found in the child or the family, for which the parents must “follow doctor’s orders.” Among the “treatments” that are recommended are parenting classes, even when parents, in all good faith, approached their local Welfare Office asking for material assistance. In some instances, asking for help can unleash a chain of events that ultimately sees the child removed from the family’s care altogether. A mother in one hearing, whose child had been removed from the family home, told me of her anguish at wanting to see them but being left in the dark as to their whereabouts, while being accused of not cooperating with the Welfare Office’s recommendations. She said: “I went to the Welfare Office for help, I wanted to help my kid, but then we saw it wasn’t [the supportive attitude] we thought it was going to be, and now we’re worried—they won’t talk to us, won’t tell us where he is sleeping.”
Further cementing the perception that the parents are the problem, and not structural poverty and material scarcity, parents are reproached in the courtroom for taking independent initiatives that do not adhere to the social workers’ orders when attempting to advocate for an alternative answer to their child’s needs. As one judge retorted to a mother, “once the Welfare [Office] is involved, the court is involved, it’s not your own opinion anymore. You cannot meet him whenever you want, it doesn’t work like that.” In another case, the parents endeavored to reverse their initial request for a temporary foster placement for their child at their neighbor’s home. They were admonished thus: “You asked for the foster home.” And the mother answered: “Only temporarily!” “This is a child, not a suitcase! From now on, I decide. For the process to work, you need to step off your personal plane and move onto the Welfare-and-courts plane. No personal contact, it’s forbidden.”
This attitude toward parents is specifically in stark contrast to the approach of the court and all its workers to the rare cases (in this sample, only one) of non-poor families applying for help. This case concerned the forced hospitalization of the child. Unlike the majority of families in these hearings, this case involved a middle-class household. Their treatment by the court highlights, by contrast, the othering practices directed at families living in poverty. “Tell the intern [to tell the judge] these are normal parents, they are amazing, but they have this problem,” a secretary in the court office was heard saying over the phone.
It is important to note that the families who appear in juvenile courts are also, in most cases, clients of Israel’s broader welfare system, receiving some combination of income support, housing aid, or disability benefits. Yet these supports are often inadequate and, more importantly, disconnected from the child protection process. The court proceedings do not integrate applying for housing insecurity, underemployment, or other benefits into the treatment plan, and they do not consider welfare’s insufficiency in their assessment of neglect. This institutional separation reinforces the criministrative logic: poverty may be partially acknowledged by other welfare agencies, but, within the courtroom, it is reframed as parental irresponsibility rather than as the structural condition shaping children’s lives. Thus, the solution provided by the courts is not a holistic approach to the family’s poverty but, rather, the separation of the children from their parents.
The structure in action: procedural othering and epistemic hierarchies
Framing parental conduct, values, or decision making as the root problem—placing the blame on individuals rather than on poverty as a social structure and on the deficiencies of the welfare system—was not only evident in the content of the decisions and the discussion but also in the symbolic and procedural aspects of the courtroom and the hearing. Following analysis of the observational data, two thematic lines emerged: (1) the courtroom setting and the “procedural othering” mechanisms employed therein and (2) the epistemic inequality present in the courtroom. It is important to note that foregrounding these systemic dynamics does not mean suggesting that parents bear no responsibility. Rather, it highlights how courts routinely overstate parental culpability, obscuring the structural role of poverty while attributing neglect primarily to individual failure.
The courtroom setting and its “procedural othering” mechanisms
The courtrooms in which child neglect and abuse cases are conducted are the same courtrooms in which juvenile criminal cases are heard, and this has powerful symbolic connotations. For instance, how the space is used and how the parties are made to sit, relative to each other, are instructive in terms of who holds the power to judge and who is the “other” being subjected to that judgment. The social workers sit at the “prosecution” table. The lawyers representing the parents, if present, and the minor’s lawyer or guardian ad litem sit on the other side, by the “defense” table. The family—the parent(s) and the minor in question—sit at the front of the “public” section.
According to procedural rules, the hearing starts with the social worker reading out loud from what is termed the “social report,” which describes the facts of the familial scenario in question. The parents are then instructed to stand up and respond to what has been heard, either by “admitting to” the facts as presented, making a “plea,” or expressing their “denial.” Should they try to explain or discuss ways to address the future steps they know are coming, they are reminded of their position by the legal professionals—the judges or the lawyers: “First, you have to admit the facts, before we talk about how to proceed and go about treatment.” While the parents sometimes voiced their discomfort with this process, this was never a point that halted the hearing or was even dwelt upon. “You know I will agree, but you know it’s not real consent. You know it’s coerced,” complained one mother to the judge. In some cases, where the parents expressed “I don’t remember reading this” or “I never got this to read,” they were asked again to agree on the spot. The protocol of the hearing is then dictated by the judge: “I have read the social report and I agree with all it says.”
The othering resulting from the performance of professionals and the management of the physical space, both of which put parents in their place—literally and figuratively—is not exclusive to the courtroom itself. It also finds other expressions in the corridors of the courthouse. While, within the courtroom, the setting is adversarial and distanced between the welfare professionals and the lawyers representing both parents and children, outside of the room, they can be seen mingling informally, sitting together and chatting, joking, and conversing about everyday life. They clearly have an ongoing relationship stemming from their continued and regular presence in the same building and within the same professional relationship, which leads to a level of familiarity, rapport, and even intimacy. As part of such a relationship, lawyers were heard advising young “rookie” social workers: “You should be saying this, and then I will say that I object and you can answer,” as if they were rehearsing a play. This informal and friendly behavior was in stark contrast to the behavior of the families and the children, who sat further away, usually by themselves, many times in total quiet or conversing in hushed voices.
The familiarity among the professional actors was also clear inside the courtroom when informally chatting about past and future cases that they had shared or in their interactions with the judges before or after the hearing: “What about [X child]? What are we going to do with them?” They also conveyed ease and familiarity with the legal space of the courtroom and with the institutional routine, sitting casually and adopting relaxed, confident postures while telling the evidently anxious parents and children where to sit. This dynamic could also be observed sometimes in the hearings themselves. In one instance, for example, the hearing was recorded as part of a pilot to substitute the hand-typed protocol, and all the professional actors in the courtroom knew about this pilot and were fully aware of its glitches and drawbacks. The families, however, were not privy to this information. Thus, when a grandfather was asked if he understood what was being asked of him as a foster caregiver, he nodded in reply, prompting the judge to clarify: “We need you to say ‘yes’ out loud because of this stupid recording, it cannot see you nod.” At this, everyone chuckled, in recognition of this reference to a known and widely discussed problem with the recorded protocol pilot. The grandfather and the mother were the only ones in the courtroom not laughing, not in on the joke.
Epistemic inequality: who are the knowers?
In an attempt to construct a problem-solving legal culture, unencumbered by strict rules, limiting procedures, and legal bureaucracies, there are no evidentiary rules or procedures in the juvenile courts. This, combined with the individual responsibility perception, leads to a diminished epistemic placing of the parents. Their claims are dismissed offhand, and, when they attempt to correct or nuance a factual claim made by the welfare professionals, their version is not accepted as knowledge. “It cannot be that a child will suffer violence in a facility, and we will not hear of it,” said one judge in response to the parents’ claims about their child’s complaints about their maltreatment at the institution. Another judge told parents raising similar concerns not to worry: “I will know what’s going on, the facility people regularly report to me.”
This epistemic hierarchy is reflected and supported in the reporting mechanisms. When parents articulated emotionally charged stories illustrating the grounds for their fears—stories about what they heard from their children and saw when they visited them or what they experienced—the welfare professionals responded with documentation and official reports. In one hearing where such fears were expressed by the parents, the social worker of the out-of-home facility in question took to the stand and read from a report, saying of the child: “He likes to complain, he routinely files complaints with his supervisors.” With this one damning comment, the social worker put an end to an entire heartfelt discussion about a possible better alternative for this child, which started with the parents reporting that they had heard he was being locked in his room for long periods of time, denied access to showers, and other grave concerns.
When parents attempted to put forward alternative narratives, they were systematically characterized as “being resistant” to the process. “We haven’t even started the discussion, and the mother says the child’s evaluation is wrong, I’m a bit worried about how this is going to go,” commented one social worker to the judge. The written reports produced by the mandatory social workers hold transformative power for they take the considerations and impressions of neighbors, teachers, and social workers and turn them into “hard knowledge,” while leaving the parents’ claims to seem like emotionally driven expressions of resistance and mere opinions. In reflecting on the role of these professionals in the system, one judge told me: “I will never take my interpretation to substitute the factual determinations of the social workers. They see the house, they smell it.” In addition to this epistemic hierarchy, families can be further disempowered by the privacy measures upheld ostensibly to protect their children. When the parents or their lawyers ask for documentary proof of the claims against them, for instance, their request is routinely denied or heavily delayed. This is because the evidence provided by the Welfare Office is often classified as confidential. Many parents claimed that they had never received the documents promised by the Welfare Office.
Finally, the epistemic hierarchy is exacerbated by the constant surveillance governing the lives of families in poverty. The parents and children are repeatedly told that their actions will not go undetected: “I will know if you don’t go to school,” one minor was warned by the judge. “We will know if you do not cooperate with the program set by the social worker,” said another judge to the mother at the end of the hearing. Through such comments, the welfare system is constructed in the eyes of the families as an ominous, omnipresent entity waiting for the families to slip up and not as the caring source of help that the term “welfare” might ordinarily suggest. While not a matter of deliberate intent, the effect is that institutions appear more ready to sanction than to assist.
Discussion and normative potential: criministrative law and the potential insight of the PAP
The findings described above provide a picture of what I call criministrative law (see also Cohen-Rimer Reference Cohen-Rimer2024). By this term, I refer to administrative legal forums that adopt criminal-style logics and rituals—such as adversarial seating, plea-like exchanges, and responsibilization of defendants—while still operating under administrative deference to welfare agencies. The result is that parents are treated as if they were defendants in criminal court, yet they are denied both the protections guaranteed in criminal proceedings and the more robust review that administrative law is meant to provide. This notion builds on existing socio-legal accounts of legal hybridity. Juliet Stumpf’s (Reference Stumpf2006) analysis of crimmigration describes a convergence in which immigration and criminal law merge into a single penal apparatus. Other scholars have identified forms of welfare-penal hybridization, showing how welfare bureaucracies deploy criminal logics to enforce compliance (Lara-Millán & Gonzalez Van Cleve, Reference Lara-Millán and Gonzalez Van Cleve2017; Bach Reference Bach2022) or how family regulation draws carceral practices into administrative domains (Haney Reference Haney2018).
Criministrative law is related but distinct. It does not describe a complete merger of legal regimes. Rather, it captures asymmetric borrowing in which criminal procedures and idioms are imported into administrative child protection forums while agency deference is preserved. It is precisely this asymmetry that produces the trap identified in the present study: families are disciplined as though they were criminally culpable but without access to either evidentiary safeguards or meaningful avenues for contesting agency authority.
The Israeli juvenile courts illustrate how this criministrative dynamic unfolds in practice. The “criminal” undertones are discernable in the structure of the hearings, the procedural rules imposed, and the role designations attached to the physical space. Starting with a performance similar to an arraignment, the court-appointed social worker, seated in the area of the courtroom associated with the “prosecution,” stands to read the deposition describing the facts that justify a declaration of destitution. Next comes the retort of the parents in an exchange that is an unsettlingly reminiscent of defendants being told to enter their plea. Having heard the grounds on which their children are being declared destitute, the parents are ordered to stand and formally declare whether they confirm or deny the facts presented before the court. The court then decides on the spot and moves immediately to the next stage, which is to establish and affirm the “treatment plan.”
Throughout the process, the lawyers of the parents, and the lawyers representing the children, are seated on the “defense” side. Recall that the system is focused on questioning individual behavior, intent, and responsibility in a manner that echoes criminal legal rationales. As we have seen, the institutional discourse, writ large, places the sole spotlight on parental capability and conduct, obviating the fact that, in most cases, the cause of the children’s problematic foundations and undesirable behaviors is systemic poverty. However, these loud criminal undertones infuse what remains, technically and legally, an administrative regime, thereby forming the dyadic apparatus identified in this article, the criministrative system. Here, we need to pay close attention to how the system operates from the administrative direction, deferring to the administrative agency and exercising a very restrictive and limited judicial review. Judges, for instance, are limited to examining the reasonableness of the welfare agency’s decisions and do not conduct their own comprehensive factual assessments. This is because, unlike criminal courts, the goal of the juvenile court is to bring all participants in line to cooperate with a process that is primarily dictated by the professionals in the administrative agency, meaning that social workers’ recommendations are only occasionally tweaked, slowed, or altered by the judges.
Officially, the juvenile court is a “problem-solving” instance (designed to, among other goals, allow for deviation from procedural rules), rendering it much less formal than a criminal setting in many ways. Hence, the actual discussion surrounding the two matters at hand—the destitution declaration and the treatment plan—takes the form of a non-structured “conversation” between the judge and each of the interested parties present. Hence, this conversation involves the parents, the child (when present), the social workers, and any other interested person, such as an additional relative, if present, or a representative of the facility currently housing the child. Yet, for all its informality and apparent inclusion of the different parties when dealing with cases of neglect, there is one further aspect of the criministrative system that is important to emphasize here. The existence, and even prevalence, of poverty in the background of these cases, coupled with the child protection system’s denial of this reality as a relevant reason for neglect, in both actions and discourse, diminishes the epistemic value granted to the non-professional figures in court (parents and children alike).
Moreover, since the remit of this court is not to establish the truth but, rather, to protect the child at the center of each hearing, and since the negation of poverty as a cause leaves the parents “marked” as the problem, the parents’ point of view and the facts that they provide are usually deemed irrelevant. Worse yet, bringing such knowledge in an attempt to contradict the information held by the state is framed as an act of resistance, proving the incapability with which they are being charged. They are thus asked to yield to reports about the alleged impact of their behavior on their child’s fate, to admit their past wrongdoing, and to get on board with the treatment plan. And, while they are being duly judged, they are simultaneously told this is not a criminal court and that the decision to allow welfare officers to keep their children away from them and determine the conditions for their reunification is definitely not a punishment. This contrast between the experience of the people before the court and the actions and discourse of the professionals driving the system illustrates the schism that stands at the heart of an administrative system turned criministrative.
I argue that this systemic reluctance to bring poverty into the equation when discussing the welfare of children is a barrier to addressing the root cause of their vulnerability. The refusal to acknowledge that it is predominantly poor families that come before the juvenile court in neglect cases—that poverty persistently shapes and constrains many children’s experiences and options in these cases—constitutes, in my view, yet another layer of institutional neglect (see also Dubowitz et al. Reference Dubowitz, Black, Starr and Zuravin1993). Such a criministrative construct is only possible because of the insistence on oversimplifying the phenomena that sustain poverty and conflating it with personal, individual failure. This individual-blame perception generally characterizes the Anglo-American liberal welfare state model, which Israel has followed since the 1980s. An alternative perception could bring about a much-needed shift in child protection matters by paving the way toward constructing a juvenile court that is more fit for purpose in terms of securing genuine protection of children’s best interests. Such a court would need to develop a holistic understanding of the dire impacts of poverty on children and adopt a more nuanced and intelligent approach—reflected in procedure, training, and discourse—to identifying children’s best interests in cases of apparent neglect.
The normative potential of the PAP
To build traction toward this holistic understanding, I contend that, as a paradigm developed to help professionals address poverty’s effects without depriving clients of agency or power, the PAP is needed. If the child protection system at large were to adopt the PAP model, this could provide vulnerable young people with more fitting protections from the hardships of poverty because it would not pseudo-criminalize their parents. Further, it would steer welfare professionals and the courts away from stripping parents of their epistemic standing and inflicting unnecessary harm on familial relations.
According to the PAP, poverty is a fundamental human rights violation. Reviewing child protection cases through the PAP lens would facilitate an understanding that the children are, indeed, victims in need of protection but rarely from their caregivers’ inability to parent. They are victims of the state’s failure to prevent poverty and to guarantee all citizens their basic human rights. This framing would remove the “criminality” edge from these procedures and transform them from a surveillance effort to identify the failings of a family to an investigation into the possible remedies that the state could provide following the acknowledgment of its failings—toward the children and toward the parents. Consequently, it would ensure that both strands of victimhood—that of the children and that of the parents—are acknowledged by the system, making space for a less infantilizing view of both parties.
Translating the PAP into legal practice would involve concrete changes at several levels. First, it would reshape the evidentiary baseline: reports and testimonies would be read with explicit attention to poverty as a structural condition, not reduced to indicators of parental failure. Second, the PAP would reorient professional training for judges, attorneys, and social workers, equipping them to recognize how structural deprivation manifests in court and to avoid interpreting scarcity as neglect. Third, it would promote a procedural voice by treating parents and children as epistemic agents whose accounts count as knowledge. Together, these shifts would alter both process and outcome: families would be offered solidarity-based interventions, such as material assistance and supportive services, rather than surveillance, sanction, or removal.
Thus, the adoption of the PAP lens could reconfigure the dynamic of the relationship between users of the welfare system and representatives of the child protection system. As such, it is much more than a thought exercise: adopting such a transformative perception would have eminently practical impacts. It could lead to a more explicit and useful legal definition of neglect (divorced from the risk perception associated with abuse, under which it is treated currently); change reporting mechanisms so that they are not so intertwined with bias against people in poverty (and infused with racial and prejudiced perceptions); and make day-to-day practices and arrangements in the courtroom in neglect cases more equal by switching to evidential practices that allow families to provide data to the court as knowers and experts on their situations, not merely as passive listeners. Eventually, the PAP could lead to the construction of a legal system framing parents as duly empowered individuals who are launching a legally justified claim with the state on behalf of their children who are to be compensated for the violation of their human rights.
Regarding the epistemology of the PAP paradigm, the findings in this article reflect that the juvenile courtrooms are currently ruled by one, and only one, group of experts: the social workers. They are the voice of authority when it comes to establishing neglect (“they see the house, they smell it”) and determining “treatment” pathways, and only they hold the knowledge of which facilities have vacancies, what programs are available in the specific geographical area, and so on. While some (not many) judges diverge from the recommended treatment course, they do so tentatively—for example, only for a limited trial period—and express concerns on the record about making such decisions. Crucially, the social workers exercise multiple sources of power that have been granted to them: legitimate, expert, and informational. Hence, in this landscape that is marked by such power—in a courtroom that mimics some of the rituals of a criminal trial—the insights that parents and children could bring to the table are viewed as carrying little epistemic weight.
Logically, neither the children nor their parents could know important facts such as the availability of certain out-of-home facilities or the latest policy updates, but they can provide crucial information regarding their abilities, lived experiences, and creative solutions. For instance, “joining the dots” between the information that the child provides and poverty awareness could encourage courts to look into the relational dynamics that they have lived through: how past interactions have shaped the responses of the child to current suggested solutions and how they view their parents and siblings in relation to themselves. PAP-infused training delivered to the professionals involved in the process—social workers, legal representatives of parents, and guardians ad litem—could shift the discourse and the outcomes of hearings.
Take, for example, the case of a minor who stubbornly refuses to cooperate with the social workers’ attempt to place them in an out-of-home facility that would better provide for their material needs. This child may exhibit hostility in court and may even refuse to speak when invited to. Applying the PAP to the court proceedings could help loosen this stand-off. Children’s resistance to removal often reflects their concerns for the well-being of their parents and siblings. In several hearings, children insisted on staying at home despite difficult circumstances, framing their objections in terms of protecting their mother or their younger brothers and sisters. Rather than interpreting such resistance as evidence of attachment or care, however, court actors frequently read it as further proof of parental irresponsibility or lack of boundaries. In a PAP framework, the treatment plan would not frame this as a “problem child,” recognizing that perhaps a better solution for them and their siblings might be a comprehensive poverty-alleviation plan for the family as a whole.
Conclusion
Child protection law exposes the broader tension at the heart of the modern welfare state: the promise of protection and care often coexists with practices of discipline and exclusion. The findings in this article have illustrated how Israeli juvenile courts engage with this tension through what I have called criministrative law. Poverty is omnipresent in the cases that appear before the court, carefully documented in professional reports and present in parents’ testimonies. Yet, when poverty emerges in the courtroom, it is not treated as a structural condition but, rather, recast as evidence of individual failure. Legal actors insist that “good parents” should be able to cope with scarcity and prevent it from harming their children. Poverty is thus acknowledged as background but actively denied as explanation. This move reframes systemic deprivation into parental culpability, legitimating intrusive state intervention while concealing the structural roots of neglect.
Understanding juvenile court hearings as criministrative law makes visible the hybrid nature of these proceedings. Administrative in form, they borrow criminal rituals—arraignment-like questioning, adversarial seating, the responsibilization of defendants—while retaining deference to welfare agencies. The outcome is a forum that combines the punitive logics of criminal law with the unchecked discretion of administrative law, without the safeguards of either. In this sense, criministrative law extends socio-legal scholarship on hybridity by identifying not only convergence between legal domains but also the asymmetric borrowing that allows one system—in this case, administrative child protection—to inflict legal gaslighting—institutional practices that deny or recode coercion as care, making resistance appear irrational or ungrateful—and deepen epistemic injustice (Fricker Reference Fricker2007).
This analysis offers three contributions. Empirically, it provides rare ethnographic access to closed Israeli juvenile courts, documenting the everyday practices through which poverty is denied and neglect reframed. Conceptually, it develops criministrative law as a framework for understanding asymmetric hybridity between administrative and criminal domains, specifically in welfare law settings. Normatively, it proposes the PAP as an alternative lens. The PAP directs attention to poverty as a structural and relational condition rather than as an individual shortcoming. It treats parents and children as epistemic agents whose knowledge must be heard, and it reframes intervention as a mode of solidarity.
Finally, it is important to stress that, while this article has been critical of the operations and practices of juvenile courts, I do not call for their abolition. These courts are uniquely placed to regroup professionals and families around the common denominator of caring for the child at risk. With the right PAP training and poverty-aware discourse, the system can achieve its protective goals while refraining from inflicting further harm. The problem is not with the commitment of individual professionals—who often strive to act in children’s best interests—but with the paradigm that frames poverty as parental failure. Unless that premise changes, even well-intentioned interventions will be built on flawed foundations.
Finally, today’s legal language remains individualized and fragmentizing. When it is applied to address the nuanced and multilayered realities of children living in poverty, it proves ill-suited to the task. The very positioning of courts as the ultimate solution reflects an individualized and judgmental perception of poverty. In the long run, a more profound systemic change is needed, such as family group conferencing models (Brown Reference Brown2003; Sundell and Vinnerljung Reference Sundell and Vinnerljung2004; Pennell et al. Reference Pennell, Basque, Najenson, Nixon and Inglis2024)—to move child protection away from adversarial legal framings altogether. Yet such a shift is unlikely to materialize quickly. In the meantime, embedding the PAP within existing legal practices offers a feasible step toward mitigating the harms of the criministrative paradigm. The ethnographic case of Israeli juvenile courts illustrates how welfare law becomes criministrative when poverty is denied and parental blame is foregrounded. Yet this dynamic is not confined to the specific jurisdiction: it is a broader tendency of liberal welfare states under conditions of inequality and competitive individualism. Exposing criministrative practices and replacing surveillance with solidarity must therefore become a central task for scholars, policy makers, and advocates seeking to address poverty, one of the most detrimental social issues of our time.
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank Tali Gal, Chaya Gershoni, Heba Zedan, and the rest of the colleagues in the program for inspiring conversations and supportive coffee breaks. Michal Krumer-Nevo, Netanel Dagan, and Hanita Kosher were very helpful in discussing the ideas and findings in this article. I thank the reviewers and the editors of Law & Social Inquiry for very helpful comments and suggestions. For their assistance in providing access to the hearings, I thank the Juvenile Courts’ administrative staff. From the bottom of my heart, I thank the children and families who allowed me to be a fly on the wall for a small part of their excruciating journey. All mistakes are still, of course, my own.
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