“Poverty Has Nothing to Do with It”: Criministrative Law and a Call for Poverty Awareness in Child Protection Procedures in Israeli Juvenile Courts

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.