Poverty Has Nothing to Do with It”

Criministrative Law and a Call for Poverty Awareness in Child Protection Procedures in Israeli Juvenile Courts

Bibliographic Data

ID12176293
AuthorsYael Cohen‐Rimer (0000-0001-6696-5428, Hebrew University of Jerusalem Faculty of Law), Yael Cohen-Rimer (Hebrew University of Jerusalem, corresponding author)
Year2026
Pages1-23
Publication date2026-02-13
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueLaw & Social Inquiry (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0897-6546 • E-ISSN: 1747-4469
PublisherCambridge University Press (CUP) (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1017/lsi.2026.10135
OpenAlexW7128818260
LanguageEN
Citations received1
References cited39

This article examines Israeli juvenile courts as sites where poverty is present yet systematically denied as a cause of child neglect. Drawing on focused ethnographic observations, I show how factual reports routinely document material deprivation—housing shortages, lack of food, utilities cutoffs—yet court actors reject poverty as a legitimate explanation for neglect. Instead, they insist that “good parents” should be able to cope with scarcity, thereby displacing structural conditions onto individualized parental failure. I frame this configuration as part of “criministrative law”: an administrative forum that adopts criminal-style rituals of blame and correction while deferring to welfare agencies, leaving families without the protections of either criminal or administrative law. This criministrative denial of poverty produces epistemic marginalization of parents and legitimates punitive interventions. As a normative remedy, I propose adapting the poverty-aware paradigm from social work to law, reframing protection as solidarity rather than surveillance

Blame · Child protection · Cognitive reframing · Denial · Normative · Nothing · Poverty · Punitive damages · Child Abuse and Trauma · Children's Rights and Participation · Criminal Justice and Corrections Analysis

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