Forever young,forever helpable: The performative submissiveness catch in juvenile courts

Abstract

Socio-legal research has traced the rise of hybrid legal regimes that combine punitive and welfare logic. This article advances this scholarship by theorizing what performative legality—legal practices where speech acts, rituals, and staged interactions shape subjects, but with the ultimate authority monopolized by state actors—does within such hybrid systems. I develop the concept of the Performative Submissiveness Catch to describe the paradoxical demand that individuals must perform both submissiveness (to qualify for help) and competence (to deserve autonomy), creating an impossible double bind that deepens dependency. By analyzing this double bind, the article demonstrates how hybrid legal regimes can entrench endless supervision and epistemic disqualification through performative practices. Drawing on ethnographic observations of Israeli child protection proceedings, I demonstrate how hearings become a form of collective performance, where judges and social workers portray “ideal parenting” to parents, infantilize them, and deny the structural role of poverty. The Performative Submissiveness Catch thus reframes child protection as a case study in how Child Protection Law constructs dependency, not only through sanctions, but through the very rituals of adjudication.

Introduction

Across multiple domains of law, socio-legal scholars have traced the rise of hybrid legal regimes that blur the boundaries between punishment, welfare, administration, and care (Arons, 2023; Bach, 2022; Beckett and Herbert, 2010; Braithwaite, 2003; Downes and Hansen, 2006; Roberts, 1991; Schwendeman et al., 2024; Stumpf, 2006; Weiss, 2025). Child protection is one of the clearest and most consequential sites of this development (Fong, 2020; Lee, 2016; Roberts, 2022; Saar-Heiman et al., 2023). Formally, juvenile courts are not criminal courts. They do not purport to determine guilt, impose punishment, or operate through the ordinary adversarial logic of accusation and defense. Rather, they are commonly justified as problem-solving institutions: forums designed to hear all relevant voices, coordinate intervention, and advance the child's best interests through treatment-oriented and future-looking decisions. In this sense, they appear to answer a longstanding critique of the ordinary lower court. If, as Pat Carlen and others showed, regular magistrates’ courts often reduce poor defendants to degraded, managed subjects rather than heard participants (Atkinson and Drew, 1979; Carlen, 1976), problem-solving courts seem designed to do the opposite.

This article argues that the contrast is overly simplistic. Based on ethnographic observation of Israeli juvenile court child-protection proceedings, I show that the problem-solving orientation of these courts does not displace coercion, but reorganizes it. The therapeutic and care-centered design of the proceeding creates a distinctive performative regime in which parents are expected to present themselves in ways that are simultaneously contradictory and institutionally legible. They must appear vulnerable enough to justify intervention, guidance, and support, yet agentic enough to warrant trust, custody, and reunification. They must show emotional openness, but not excessive emotion; dependence on services, but also responsibility and self-control; willingness to speak, but only in forms that confirm the institutional account of their situation. The result is what I term the performative submissiveness catch: a legal dynamic in which care is conditioned on submissiveness, and submissiveness in turn becomes evidence that the parent is not a fully credible knower of her own life, and therefore not a preferable carer for her own children.

The article's contribution is therefore not only to identify hybridity in child protection proceedings, but to show how such hybridity is enacted through performative legality. By performative legality, I refer to legal practices in which courtroom speech, ritual, role-modeling, and staged interaction do not merely express prior legal judgments but help constitute the subjects whom law then assesses. In the hearings observed here, judges and welfare officials do not simply evaluate parenting capacity. Through repeated admonitions, praise, correction, and demands for cooperation, they participate in producing the figure of the proper parent against which actual parents are measured (Ding, 2022). This process is not merely theatrical in the weak sense of legal ritual or symbolism (Lees and Pedersen, 2025). It is performative in the stronger sense that the hearing itself helps create the categories of vulnerability, responsibility, credibility, and deficiency through which the family is governed (Butler, 2011b; Golder, 2018; Schuster, 1999).

This dynamic is especially important in problem-solving courts because such courts are often understood as spaces of listening, participation, and humane state action. Their legitimacy rests in part on the claim that they replace adversarial detachment with relational engagement and legal formalism with context-sensitive care (Collins, 2020; Dancig-Rosenberg and Gal, 2024; Gal and Dancig-Rosenberg, 2020; Shdaimah, 2023). Yet the material examined here shows that the turn to treatment does not necessarily widen parents’ voice in any meaningful way. On the contrary, it can generate a setting in which speech is invited only on condition that it takes a recognizable therapeutic form. Parents are asked to explain themselves, account for their choices, and participate in planning for their families. But when their accounts challenge the institutional narrative, contest welfare expertise, or situate family difficulties in poverty and structural deprivation, those accounts are frequently recast as excuses, denial, resistance, or proof of deficient parental insight. The promise of voice is thus transformed into a mechanism of regulation.

The article further argues that this process gives rise to a recurrent form of testimonial injustice (Ballakrishnen and Lawsky, 2022; Fricker, 2007; Kidd et al., 2017; McKinnon, 2016; Putnam, 2020). Parents are not silenced in the literal sense; indeed, they are often encouraged to speak. But their speech is differentially authorized. To be heard as cooperative, they must speak the language of need, treatment, and self-correction. When they speak as interpreters of their own circumstances—when they contest the social worker's account, explain conduct in terms not recognized by the court, or object to the proportionality of the intervention—their testimony is frequently discounted as unreliable, manipulative, or lacking insight. In this way, the performative demand for submissiveness helps justify epistemic subordination, and that epistemic subordination in turn reinforces continued intervention. The process becomes circular: one must submit in order to receive care, and one's submission becomes evidence that one cannot be trusted without state care.

To make this argument, I draw on ethnographic observations of child-protection hearings in seven Israeli juvenile courts. Child protection represents one of the state's most intrusive legal systems (Fong, 2020), establishing the justifications and mechanisms through which the state enters the most private sphere—the family home and familial relationships—with the explicit intention of transforming them (Ben-Arieh, 2014; Davidson-Arad et al., 2003). While the stated focus of child protection processes is the child, the underlying rationale used to justify state intervention invariably points to adults’ personal failure to meet the standards of “good enough” parenting (Runyan et al., 2005; Slack et al., 2004).

The juvenile court system thus offers a particularly useful site for this inquiry because it is formally civil and welfare-oriented, yet structured around recurring interventions into families living under conditions of poverty, surveillance, and institutional dependency. The hearings observed reveal a dense repertoire of judicial and professional practices: infantilizing forms of address, behavioral correction, temporal disciplining, praise for compliance, rebuke for emotion, and repeated invitations to “accept help” - through which parents are constituted as subjects of care and suspicion at once. These practices are not incidental to the legal process. They are among its central mechanisms.

The broader implication is that the familiar opposition between “regular courts” and “problem-solving courts” obscures an important continuity. The movement from adjudication to treatment does not necessarily lessen hierarchy, domination, or symbolic degradation. It may instead relocate them into the language of listening, care, and professional help. What changes is not the disappearance of coercion, but its style, justification, and institutional grammar. By tracing that shift, this article contributes to socio-legal scholarship on legal hybridity, performative legality, and poverty governance, and offers a more critical account of what it means for a court to solve problems rather than merely judge them.

The article proceeds as follows. The literature review situates juvenile court proceedings within the literature on criministrative law (Cohen-Rimer, 2024, 2026) and develops the concept of performative legality for the child-protection setting. The next part briefly outlines the structure of Israeli juvenile court proceedings and the ethnographic methodology underlying the study. The analysis that follows shows, first, how courtroom practices constitute and demand parental submissiveness; second, how they simultaneously demand agency, composure, and responsibility; third, how these demands collapse into an impossible double bind that authorizes testimonial injustice; and, finally, how the temporal and spatial features of the proceedings entrench the family's subjection to the court as an ongoing relation rather than a discrete legal event. The conclusion, as can be expected, concludes.

Theoretical framework

Courts, hybridity, and the limits of the regular/problem-solving distinction

Socio-legal scholarship has long treated courts as sites in which legality is produced not only through formal adjudication, but also through ritual, hierarchy, and the organization of voice. Classic studies of lower courts showed that proceedings involving socially marginalized people often do more than resolve disputes or apply legal rules. They may also degrade, discipline, and reorder social relations through the process itself (Carlen, 1976; Feeley, 1979; Sarat et al., 2011). In a different but related register, more recent scholarship on hybrid legal governance has drawn attention to legal domains in which punitive effects, administrative discretion, and welfare-oriented justifications are increasingly intertwined (Arons, 2023; Bach, 2022; Beckett and Herbert, 2010; Cohen-Rimer, 2026; Stumpf, 2006; Super, 2010; Weiss, 2025).

Alongside these developments, the literature on problem-solving courts has often described a different institutional aspiration. Problem-solving courts have been framed as a response to the limits of ordinary adjudication: less adversarial, more attentive to context, more future-oriented, and more invested in treatment, participation, and practical resolution (Berman and Feinblatt, 2001; Gal and Dancig-Rosenberg, 2020; Ronner, 2002; Wexler, 2000, 2008; Winick, 2002). Taken together, however, these bodies of scholarship leave an important question insufficiently explored. The literature on lower courts and hybrid legality has offered powerful accounts of discipline, degradation, and institutional entanglement, while the literature on problem-solving courts has largely focused on therapeutic aspiration, procedural participation, and the promise of humane intervention. What remains less fully examined is the relationship between these two strands: how courts that are explicitly designed to hear, help, and solve problems may nonetheless reproduce hierarchy and discipline through the very modalities that distinguish them from “regular” courts.

It is here that the concept of criministrative law is useful. As developed elsewhere, criministrative law refers to legal processes that merge features conventionally associated with criminal law -individualizing blame, responsibilization, and severe effects - with the discretionary, expertise-centered, and supervisory orientation of administrative governance, while obscuring or denying the hybridity of that combination (Cohen-Rimer, 2024, 2026). The concept captures an institutional form that is especially relevant to child protection, but it does not by itself explain how such hybridity is enacted within courtroom interaction. For that, a more specifically performative account is needed.

Performance, performativity, and legality

The language of performance has appeared in socio-legal scholarship in more than one sense. One line of work, drawing on speech-act theory and later theories of performativity, emphasizes the constitutive dimension of authoritative utterance: the idea that legal speech may do more than describe reality and may instead participate in bringing legal and social realities into being (Austin, 2009; Butler, 2011b, 2011a, 2016; Golder, 2018, 2022). This tradition is useful for thinking about the ways legal institutions classify persons, authorize some accounts over others, and shape the terms on which subjects are made legible.

A related but distinct line of work has approached law through theater, ritual, role, and staging. Here, the concern is with the courtroom as a socially organized scene in which authority is displayed, embodied, and communicated through ceremonial form, repetition, and audience (Cavanagh and Sarat, 1980; Cover, 1983, 2007; Derrida, 2016; Goffman, 1959; Lees and Pedersen, 2025; Mulcahy, 2022). This scholarship has been especially valuable in showing that legal power is not exhausted by doctrine or decision. It is also enacted through spatial arrangement, embodied interaction, and ritualized speech.

These literatures provide important resources for understanding child-protection hearings, but they do not fully resolve the questions raised by problem-solving courts. Scholarship on performativity clarifies how institutional speech can shape social status and legal meaning. Scholarship on law as performance clarifies how courtroom interaction is staged and how authority is communicated. Yet neither literature has fully addressed how a therapeutic court, organized around listening, treatment, and support, may mobilize performance as part of a specifically care-oriented mode of governance. Nor has existing scholarship fully explored how performative practices in such courts may help structure whose voice becomes intelligible, credible, and actionable.

This gap matters because problem-solving courts are often normatively distinguished from ordinary courts precisely by reference to voice. Their legitimacy is tied to the claim that they are more responsive to lived context, more participatory, and less formally adversarial. But if participation in such courts is shaped by institutional expectations about appropriate emotion, insight, receptivity, and self-presentation, then the question is not only whether parties are invited to speak. It is also under what conditions their speech can be heard as meaningful, cooperative, and authoritative. Existing scholarship points toward this issue, but has not fully conceptualized it in the child-protection setting.

Voice, credibility, and the epistemic conditions of participation

A further set of questions concerns the epistemic structure of participation in legal settings. Socio-legal and critical legal scholarship has long shown that formal inclusion in the legal process does not guarantee meaningful recognition, equal interpretive authority, or equal credibility. Parties may be present, speak, and even appear to participate, while nonetheless being differentially authorized as knowers of their own circumstances. This concern has been developed in different ways across the literature on legal authority, welfare governance, and epistemic injustice (Fricker, 2007; McKinnon, 2016). The concept of testimonial injustice is especially relevant here. It names situations in which a speaker's account is accorded less credibility than it merits because of features attached to the speaker rather than the content of the speech. In legal and quasi-legal settings, this concept is helpful because it sharpens attention to the conditions under which some forms of speech are taken up as reliable, insightful, and actionable while others are reclassified as excuse, denial, confusion, or noncompliance. In contexts governed through expertise and intervention, this question becomes particularly acute, as institutional actors often control both the normative framework of the encounter and the criteria by which participation is judged.

Child protection, poverty, and the therapeutic governance of family life

These questions become sharper still in light of the long-recognized entanglement between child protection and poverty. Critical scholarship has shown that neglect is often difficult to disentangle from material deprivation, and that child welfare intervention disproportionately affects families whose lives are already marked by economic vulnerability and institutional scrutiny (Duva et al., 2010; Gupta, 2017; Maguire-Jack and Font, 2017; McSherry, 2004; Naveed, 2022; Pasian et al., 2020; Roberts, 1999). Other work has highlighted the expansive role of professional assessment, the instability of the neglect category, and the ways in which support and surveillance are frequently co-constituted in welfare-oriented interventions (Fong, 2020; Lee, 2016; Roberts, 2022).

This literature makes clear that child protection is not simply a domain of benevolent care. Nor, however, is it exhausted by familiar accounts of punishment or bureaucratic exclusion. It occupies a more complicated position: one in which the state intervenes through the language of help, care, and best interests, while also imposing ongoing scrutiny, behavioral expectations, and asymmetrical demands for self-explanation. The importance of that hybrid form has been widely recognized. Less clear, however, is how it is reproduced and stabilized in courtroom practice itself.

In particular, the literature does not yet adequately explain how child-protection hearings organize the relationship between parental submissiveness and parental agency; how therapeutic expectations are translated into courtroom interaction; and how these processes bear on the uptake of parents’ own testimony. These are not secondary questions. In proceedings where intervention is justified by concern for the child yet often depends on the parent's demonstrated insight, cooperation, and progress, the terms on which vulnerability is recognized may shape not only legal outcomes but the very possibility of being heard as a competent participant.

This article takes up that set of questions. Rather than assuming that problem-solving courts correct the pathologies of ordinary courts, or that therapeutic legality is inherently more participatory, it examines how child-protection hearings structure voice, care, and credibility in practice. The sections that follow first outline the Israeli juvenile court context and the ethnographic approach of the study, before turning to the observed courtroom dynamics through which Submissiveness, responsibility, and parental testimony are made legally meaningful.

Child protection—Doctrinal background for the study

The empirical material analyzed in this article comes from child-protection proceedings in the Israeli juvenile court system. While local and specific, the Israeli system is similar to other liberal welfare states (Esping-Andersen, 2008; Pollack, 2010), where child protection systems are built around the concept of risk prevention (Duva et al., 2010; Enosh and Topilsky, 2014; Saar-Heiman et al., 2023). This similarity allows for a broader conceptualization extrapolated from the local empirical findings.

In the Israeli system, these courts are a specialized branch of the magistrates’ courts, staffed by designated juvenile judges. They hear both criminal matters involving minors and civil child-protection cases under the Youth Law (Care and Supervision), 5720-1960, together with related juvenile legislation introduced through later reforms (Reichenberg 2021). For present purposes, the relevant proceedings are the civil hearings concerning children deemed to require state protection.

In these proceedings, a social worker appointed under the statute brings the case before the court and presents both the basis for state intervention and a proposed plan for the child and family. If the court determines that the child is “destitute,” that determination effectively suspends the parents’ ordinary legal decision-making authority and transfers custodial authority, in legal terms, to the state, even where the child remains physically at home. The practical significance of the hearing therefore extends beyond welfare coordination. It is the moment at which intervention is judicially authorized and an official treatment plan is given legal force.

Although formally civil, these proceedings are not structured as ordinary adversarial litigation. The social worker's account is presented to the court, the parents are asked to respond, and the hearing then moves into a broader discussion involving the judge, the parents, welfare officials, and at times additional participants, including the child, a guardian ad litem, relatives, or representatives of facilities in which the child has been placed. Children over the age of twelve are generally present unless they choose not to attend. Parents may be represented by privately retained counsel or, where eligible, by state-funded legal aid.

Two features of this legal setting are especially important for the present analysis. First, the declaration of destitution and the approval of the intervention plan are formally distinct but practically intertwined. The court does not simply determine whether legal criteria are met and only afterward consider the remedy. Rather, questions of status, care, compliance, and future family conduct are folded together within the same hearing. Second, the resulting orders are temporary but subject to ongoing judicial review and can be lifted only by a judge. In practice, this means that families return to court repeatedly, often annually and sometimes more frequently, under continuing conditions of supervision. The proceeding is therefore not a one-time legal event but part of an ongoing relation of monitored dependency.

This institutional structure makes the juvenile court a particularly revealing site for the present study. The court is formally oriented toward protection, welfare, and the child's best interests, and in that sense resembles the problem-solving model more than the conventional adjudicative one. At the same time, it operates through recurring demands that parents respond to official accounts of their family life, accept or contest professional recommendations, and demonstrate their suitability for greater autonomy under conditions of marked asymmetry. It is precisely this combination of therapeutic aspiration, legal authority, and recurring supervision that makes the setting analytically useful for examining how care, credibility, and parental participation are organized in practice.

Methodology

The study is based primarily on ethnographic observation of juvenile court child-protection proceedings in Israel (details on sites, access, observation protocols, and analysis appear below). In addition, I held a small number of informal background conversations with court professionals and lawyers. These were opportunistic and unstructured; they were not conducted as formal interviews and are not analyzed as primary data. They served only to clarify procedures and roles and to help interpret what I observed in hearings. All findings and claims in this article derive from observational data and the analytic procedures described in this Methods section.

Observational studies are known to offer many advantages, especially because they allow the researcher to experience direct impressions of the different actors while witnessing social occurrences in the field (Rosenbaum, 2005; 2010). This aspect was especially important in the present research, given that, to date, no such observations have been allowed by court management for several decades in Israel. The observations, therefore, provided a rare opportunity to analyze the “black box” showing how the juvenile court proceedings usually operate (Cahill-O’Callaghan, 2023; Mulcahy, 2022).

Participants, sample, and recruitment

The research design revolved around a series of observations conducted during the period February–September 2024, in seven juvenile courts. The sessions observed involved eleven out of the eighteen active judges in the Israeli juvenile system. ¹

Following the required approval from academic and judicial authorities, the researcher contacted seven juvenile courts, which represented a geographically and socially diverse 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”—that is, civil cases regarding child neglect and abuse—even though, in most courts, the hearing day covers both criminal cases, heard by the judge in the scheduled order or sometimes in accordance with urgency. Overall, 50 hearings were observed.

Research instrument and data collection

Inside the courtrooms, the observations were conducted by the researcher using a handwritten field journal, as per common practice in focused ethnography research (Emerson et al., 2001; Knoblauch, 2005). During the hearings, the journal was used to record details of what was said and other observations, such as physical descriptions of the parties and the courtroom environment, including perceptions of the “emotional climate”; and the parties’ demeanor, tone, style, and emotions, as expressed in their interactions. Legal data for each hearing was also recorded, including the parties present, the hearing's legal cause, and the length of the hearing.

Data analysis

The field journal was analyzed, together with in-process memos, to identify, cross-reference, and develop analytical themes (Emerson et al., 2001). The field notes were analyzed using discourse analysis and the thematic analysis method to identify and organize themes and patterns (Fitzgerald and Graham, 2011). Additional textual materials and transcripts of the field journal were fed into a concept database (Atlas.ti). Guided by abductive analysis, I coded each transcript line-by-line. Abductive analysis is an iterative process whereby qualitative researchers move back and forth between their data and the literature, seeking to identify features of the data unexplained by existing theory. During my first “open” round of coding, I applied descriptive codes to each line of data to capture high-level themes in participants’ work. During later rounds of coding, I searched for patterns within and connections between high-level themes, thereby illuminating their operation. Throughout, I noted findings that were surprising—and therefore theory-generating—considering existing literature.

The concept developed in the article—the Performative Submissiveness Catch—emerged through this iterative engagement with the material. It was not used as a prior coding category. Rather, it was developed analytically in response to a repeated pattern in the observations: the simultaneous demand that parents appear open to intervention, guidance, and support, while also demonstrating the insight, composure, and agency required for restored trust and autonomy. The analysis does not assume that every interaction in every hearing reproduced the same logic in identical form; rather, it identifies a recurring institutional pattern that appeared across varied sites and cases, notwithstanding moments of friction, contestation, or uneven uptake.

Ethics

The research was approved by both the Hebrew University of Jerusalem Ethics Committee (approval number 2024HLE012) and the Israeli court management's Research Department. Per the conditions upon which the study was approved, verbal consent was requested by each participant—child/ren, parent/s, social workers, and lawyers/guardians ad litem—before each hearing commenced. In addition to the verbal consent, a note signaling the researcher's presence was introduced into the protocol of the hearing.

Findings and discussion

Sitting in the courtroom, at the benches allocated for the public (non-participants), sit a mother, an older brother, and a teenage girl. At the prosecutor's table sit two social workers, and at the defendant's table a guardian ad litem appointed by the court for the child, and the legal aid lawyer appointed for the parent. The judge enters the room. All stand, and when seated, the social worker reads from her reports. She describes how the girl expresses her will to go back home and how her family is cooperating with her, obscuring the process agreed upon in the previous hearing. The judge turns to the mother, saying: “You think you’re helping her, but you remember how she was, you remember how you could not support her? We’re here to help you.” The mother, in return, turns to the girl: “You will do as you’re told, do you hear? You will do what they tell you to do!” The judge reads aloud her decision: four more months in the out-of-home facility, and then they can come back to court and revisit the idea of reunification. After the family leaves the room, the judge says to the social workers, the lawyer, and the guardian who stay in the room: she (referring to the mother) hasn’t changed her ways. She doesn’t understand she needs help. She's just performing for us, but at the end of the day, when she’ll need clothes for the girl, she’ll come right back to the welfare office.

In some ways, the observed hearings resembled the participatory ideal of the problem-solving court. Multiple actors were present, judges spoke directly to parents and children, the exchange was conversational and lacked procedural order or jargon, and the language of the proceedings was one of support, progress, and care for the children. Yet the very structure of this participation was sharply asymmetrical. Parents were repeatedly invited to speak, explain, and cooperate, but within an interactional frame already defined by judicial and professional authority. What emerged from the observations was not simply a contradiction between welfare and punishment, but a recurring process through which care became conditional on specific forms of self-presentation. The analysis below traces that mechanism as unfolded in the courtroom.

Within the context of this article, the focus of the analysis will be the plethora of performative expressions demanded from the parents by the judges and social workers—addressed here as the professionals in the courtroom. Importantly, note throughout the following analysis the isomorphism that exists between judges and social workers in their discourse and approaches toward the parents and children. While holding different formal positions in the hearing, their respective discursive stances are strikingly similar. Together, they represent “the state's” discursive performance toward the families entering the juvenile court.

Therapeutic discourse and being helpable as the aspired objective for parents

“Once we’re in the picture, you cannot do what you want anymore. You should ask the social worker for help. She's here for you. You cannot decide on your own, this is not how this works”

“Leave the emotions aside, when there's a court order, you have me. You can come to me, talk to me.”

Through repeated and varied interactions, the professional actors encouraged parents to participate in the legal process, emphasizing the importance of their cooperation with the court and their understanding—and approval—of the measures taken. The parents’ receptiveness to the state's care was of utmost importance and a recurring theme in the exchanges in court. Importantly, the court does not simply recognize pre-existing vulnerability. It organizes the hearing so that being a good parent-participant means being helpful, corrigible, and professionally guided. Children and parents alike were explicitly told to “ask for help” from social services, framing dependency not as a problem but as a virtue. Judges praised parents who were seen as “moving forward to cooperate with social services.”

The therapeutic discourse was not only evident in the overt references to care and the need for assistance, but also in the focus on the legal situation as an ongoing, long, relational process. In the observed sessions, judges and other professionals repeatedly remarked on the importance of the process in and of itself, for two main reasons anchored in time and space. Using time and space, the system—through judges and social workers—creates a relationship with the families that these agents portray as healthy and safe, as an ideal parental relationship should be.

In relation to time, judges often remarked on the length of the process: “I have known this case for eight years,” or “we’ve known each other a long while.” The process of abuse and neglect cases is, indeed, a lengthy one, and, unlike regular court cases, it is not finished when a verdict is reached. On the contrary, as one judge explained to a parent questioning what it means, legally, to pronounce the child “in need”: “it means now you have the ongoing involvement of the court.” And then added: “Trust me, this is what you want.” In background conversations, judges and social workers explained that the long duration of the process facilitates commitment and good communications between the parties.

The importance of being placed under the regime of the juvenile court and the process it delineates is even clearer when its upper limit draws near. When children turn eighteen, they age out of the system. Should they become involved in criminal activity, they will no longer be tried in juvenile courts, and the ability of the state to care for them and provide them with alternative homes ceases. All professionals who participated in this study reflected this point as a worry when discussing cases of older children. A guardian ad litem told one boy, for example: “because you’re sixteen-and-a-half, there's enough time for the judge to track you [to follow your progress and offer other interventions if needed]. If you were seventeen, I would have said that's it, you’re done.” Another judge also told one teenager verging on the upper threshold of the juvenile court's authority, “so long as I have you in this process, I can think what to do with you,” alluding to the idea that, beyond the system, he would be unable to help or protect the individual.

As to space, judges and lawyers repeatedly expressed the notion that families were to view the courtroom as a safe space, both neutral and formal (clean, quiet, but relaxed). On the one hand, “They [the social workers] don’t decide here, I do,” one judge told an angry mother, separating the judicial system from the welfare administrative agency, which is frequently regarded by the parents as “the enemy” going after their children. And “This is a safe space, not your home and not the welfare office. You can trust this space” was typical of the kind of messages that judges conveyed to children on multiple occasions. In their designated conversations—which are structured by law to provide an opportunity for children's participation and, per procedural rule, are struck from the protocol—confidentiality provides another cover of safety. “No one will know what you say here, not your parents and not any social worker, only me. You can speak freely,” judges told the children (for more on these kinds of conversations, see Rimer-Cohen, 2025).

The dark side of the therapeutic discourse—Infantilization, parental class, and the reshaping of voice

“As long as I have you in this process, you have me in the family.”

“They [the children] all want to go home but after a while, there's a shift, they understand that they may be better off someplace else.”

“This is not a coffee-shop conversation!”

“Don’t yell like that in your child's presence.”

“Let me explain, calmly. You should be calm when talking to children.”

In many interactions, court actors positioned parents as childlike, dependent, and in need of professional guidance, signaling that the performance of helplessness was essential to receiving “help.” Judges frequently modeled “ideal parenting”—using an authoritative parenting style (Hendrick, 2016)—toward the parents themselves, using a tone and language more often reserved for children.

The infantilization was reinforced through the consistent use of familial terms—“mom” and “dad”—in place of names (in a way that reminded me of the practice used by nurses in the postnatal clinics, in a similar attempt to “jumpstart” maternal feelings within the new mother). These were coupled with evaluative language that echoed school report cards: “we are proud of you,” “she has come a long way,” “it's clear there's big love here.” Social workers and lawyers commented on “progress” in ways that cast parents as perpetual pupils, never fully graduated from professional oversight.

Continuing the approach of “ideal parenting” towards the parents led to the judges being stern and authoritative when addressing technical “offenses” committed by the parents. Judges regularly admonished parents for being late, regardless of transportation barriers or work conflicts: “This is your daughter's hearing, and you were late!” One judge cut a parent out of participation entirely, stating, “You will not speak now! You were late!”. In some hearings, judges critiqued past parenting decisions, urging proactive boundary-setting: “If you won’t build a good relationship with them, you will not see them.”

The ongoing relationship facilitated by this ongoing care process is also referenced by professional guardians in their courtroom discourse to underline the understanding that the minors now “belong” to the system. In a way, the judges replace and keep model the parental “healthy” relationship. For example, one guardian (a lawyer), addressing the judge while referencing a teenage girl sitting before them, said: “I promised her that you are getting updates about her, that you know her [and her story].”

During this relationship and ongoing “parental class,” parents are told that only specific participation is advised. Judges were instructing parents to “control your emotions,” warning them not to share adult concerns with their children. In other cases, the parental behaviors attempting participation in the courtroom were used for an “educational moment,” when judges steered towards emotional regulation and rational problem-solving: “Part of being a parent is holding it back!”. Parents were told to “be strong for your children” while also being reminded of their dependence on court approval. Judges praised compliance as “good progress” while reasserting ongoing oversight. “We are now watching, yes? If the children are left alone in the house, we will know! They [the social workers] will come and whoosh! Take them away! And not give them back!” one mother was told by a judge.

Conditional participation as part of the therapeutic process—The testimonial injustice resulting from the catch

“I ask for short answers to my questions. Don’t give me the whole story”

“You’re always telling me reasons. Stop making excuses and start acting.”

A recurring pattern in these moments was the epistemic bind of parents before the court. Parents were often asked to explain their decisions, recount events, or justify perceived lapses — only to have their accounts reframed as “excuses,” “stories,” or “denial.” Another time, when a father explained a missed visitation by describing a sudden change in work shifts, the judge cut him off: “You’re always telling me reasons. Stop making excuses and start acting.” Here, the demand for an explanation was simultaneously a demand for action, and the very act of explanation was used as evidence of inaction. This rejection of parental accounts reinforced the idea that valid knowledge resided solely with professionals, making it impossible for parents to speak as credible agents in their own defense. Even when they are asking to be validated, parents were only partly acknowledged - when one mother asked, “Did it do any good when I spoke just now?” she was told, “It always does some good when you speak. It also does a lot of good to listen.”

When they challenged the knowledge and decisions of the administrative agency, parents were threatened and their position—as helpable and as knowledge makers—was denied. For example, at one hearing, one parent explained, distraught: “I have seen a behavioral problem [in my children], I wanted help addressing it, but to take them to this infamous out-of-home facility? What are they, criminals?” To this, the social worker replied: “Yes, if they behave like that, they are criminals, and they should be given harsher boundaries. This is the best place for them. If you want my help, this is what I can give you; remember that next time you call me at 19:30 at night to ask for my help!”

In such moments, the poles of the performative submissiveness catch collapse into one another. Parents are tasked with performing submissiveness and accepting the state's interpretation, while simultaneously proving their ability to perform as knowledgeable and agentic enough for reunification. The epistemic disqualification of their own accounts ensures that they cannot meet either demand, keeping them in a perpetual state of procedural dependency and ensuring that the process—and the state's supervisory role—continues indefinitely.

Most parents I’ve seen in the hearings did not acknowledge this tension head-on. One mother, though, stated clearly: “You’re taking my girl and putting so much money in her out-of-home placement. You only took her ‘cause in the home visit, she didn’t have enough underwear. Give me the damn money, I’ll buy the underwear!”. To this pinpointing of the issue of material poverty as a reason for the child's situation and not maternal failure, the judge responded by asking the mother to restrain herself and not shout. “Everybody is here trying to help you and her. We will find together the right solution, but a parent needs to take responsibility, you cannot always blame others.”

This is where the testimonial injustice takes its most concrete form, in a specific institutional architecture (Fricker, 2007). What the observations show is not merely that parents are spoken to harshly, interrupted, or treated paternalistically. The more specific pattern is that participation itself is structured through unequal terms of intelligibility. Parents are repeatedly called upon to speak, explain, and demonstrate concern. But to count as cooperative, their speech must take a particular form: it must ratify the therapeutic framing of the hearing, accept professional interpretations, and display the appropriate mixture of need, receptivity, and self-correction. When parents speak in that register, their participation may be taken as evidence of progress. When they depart from it—when they challenge the social worker's account, explain their conduct in terms of poverty or constraint, object to the proportionality of the intervention, or insist on their own understanding of the child's needs—their speech is more readily recast as excuse, denial, or lack of insight. The issue, therefore, is not silence alone. It is that voice is institutionally invited but differentially credited.

Seen in this light, the performative submissiveness catch is not simply a contradiction between vulnerability and agency in the abstract. It is a recurring courtroom mechanism. Parents are required to appear helpable in order to deserve care, yet departures from that posture may be used to deny them credibility, and that loss of credibility in turn helps justify continued supervision. Submissiveness thus becomes both the condition of access to assistance and part of the justification for withholding autonomy. What the hearings produce is not only a demand for compliance, but a circular relation between care, epistemic authority, and dependency. Parents are drawn into participation on terms that make full participation structurally difficult to achieve.

This helps clarify the particular contribution of the ethnography. Prior socio-legal scholarship has shown that courts may degrade, discipline, and individualize structural problems through the process itself rather than only through formal outcomes (Bach, 2013; Carlen, 1976; Feeley, 1979). The present observations do not displace that insight, but refine it for the problem-solving setting. The hearings examined here were not organized as openly adversarial or conventionally punitive spaces. They were organized as caring, future-oriented, and participatory forums. Precisely for that reason, the mechanism of domination took a distinctive form. It operated not despite the language of help, listening, and improvement, but through it. The article's point is therefore not simply that child protection courts fail to live up to a therapeutic ideal. It is that the therapeutic form itself can become a means of regulating whose speech counts, what kind of parent can appear before the court as redeemable, and under what conditions care is extended.

This also bears on the way problem-solving courts are typically contrasted with “regular” lower courts. That contrast has often been framed in terms of voice, context, and humane responsiveness: the ordinary court is imagined as summary and distant, while the problem-solving court is imagined as attentive, relational, and equipped to address the social conditions underlying legal intervention. The observations here complicate that picture. They suggest that the move from adjudication to treatment does not necessarily loosen hierarchy or widen the space for meaningful participation. It may instead relocate these dynamics into a different institutional grammar—one centered on guidance, self-improvement, and professionally mediated care. What changes is less the disappearance of coercion than its mode of justification and expression. The problem-solving court does not cease to govern through asymmetry; it governs through a more intimate and pedagogic form of it.

The findings also deepen the account of criministrative law developed earlier in the article. Criministrative hybridity is not only a matter of overlapping legal logics or mixed institutional mandates. It is also enacted through recurring interactional practices. In the hearings observed here, the criminalizing dimensions of intervention—blame, correction, demands for reform, and conditional restoration of trust—were folded into an avowedly welfare-oriented and administrative setting. Yet because the process was framed as supportive rather than punitive, these demands appeared not as sanctions but as care. This is part of what makes the arrangement especially durable. Unlike criminal proceedings, which formally culminate in a sentence, or administrative decisions, which are often imagined as discrete determinations, child-protection hearings create ongoing relationships of oversight in which contradictory demands can be reimposed over time. The performative dimensions of the hearing - its self-presentation as a safe space, its modeling of “good parenting,” and its repeated insistence on cooperation—help stabilize this extended supervisory relation.

Finally, the analysis points to a broader issue in poverty governance. The parents observed in these hearings were repeatedly judged on punctuality, demeanor, communication style, emotional restraint, and openness to intervention, while the structural conditions that shaped family life—material deprivation, unstable work, lack of transport, inadequate housing, and other practical constraints—were rarely taken up as organizing features of the legal problem itself. In that sense, the hearings reproduced a familiar move in welfare law: the translation of structural hardship into individualized parental deficiency. But they did so through a specifically therapeutic and participatory idiom. The result was not only the responsibilization of poor parents, but the re-description of poverty-related strain as evidence of insufficient parental insight, insufficient emotional regulation, or insufficient readiness for autonomy. The process thus carried forward a public narrative in which the problem to be solved was defective parenting, rather than the conditions under which parenting was taking place.

For these reasons, reforms directed solely at procedural fairness in the narrow criminal sense, or solely at improving administrative review, are unlikely to be sufficient. The difficulty lies not only in the allocation of formal rights, but in the performative and epistemic structure of the hearing itself: who is recognized as a credible interpreter of family life, what forms of self-presentation count as cooperative, and how therapeutic participation becomes a condition of continued state authority. Attending to these dimensions makes visible a more general socio-legal problem. Courts designed to solve social problems may also participate in reproducing them when the very terms of care require those subject to intervention to appear in institutionally subordinate forms.

By tracing how vulnerability and agency are performatively constructed in the same legal space, this study contributes to a deeper understanding of criministrative law's hybrid nature and of performative legality's constitutive effects. It shows that the “parent in training” role is not a temporary phase within the process but the outcome toward which the process continually pushes. This insight has implications well beyond child protection, pointing to similar traps in other welfare–criminal–administrative hybrids, from housing courts to public benefits adjudication.

Conclusion

The article has identified what I term the Performative Submissiveness Catch. Parents were repeatedly required to appear receptive to help, open to correction, and willing to submit to professional guidance in order to be seen as deserving of care. Yet departures from that posture could then be used to discount their testimony and justify continued supervision. The problem, therefore, was not only that the proceedings were coercive beneath a therapeutic surface. It was that the therapeutic form itself helped organize a circular relation between care, epistemic authority, and dependency.

This contributes to socio-legal scholarship in two related ways. First, it suggests that the move from adjudication to treatment should not be understood as a simple shift from punitive legality to humane responsiveness. Problem-solving courts may indeed alter the tone, idiom, and institutional style of legal intervention, but they do not thereby escape asymmetry. They may instead relocate it into a more intimate, pedagogic, and care-oriented register. Second, the article extends the account of criministrative law by showing that hybridity is not only doctrinal or institutional. It is also interactional and performative. It is enacted in the repeated courtroom practices through which parents are made legible as helpable subjects while remaining only conditionally credible as interpreters of their own lives.

It is worth noticing that this kind of double-bind is an occurrence that typifies a general welfare-state trap within the liberal model, which is built on a market paradigm and individual responsibility (Esping-Andersen, 2008; Honig, 2013), and expects citizens to turn to the private market to meet all their needs, operating independently of state assistance. In this model, people in poverty who are found to be deserving of state assistance are regarded as the eternal victims of circumstance. That is, they are eternally destined to have the potential to grow into self-reliant participants in the market but never to be “fully grown,” never to have the agency to make their own decisions and choose based on their priorities and world views. As in welfare law in general, this show is not exclusively for the families, but the law carries an expressive role for the public, who are fed a narrative in which it is the parents, not systemic poverty, that are to blame for child neglect. And so, it goes on: the solution that derives from this framing is not to address the systemic roots of poverty but to separate the children from their parents and to educate or “treat” these defective caregivers.

In this article I take up the invitation of Young, Martin and Lageson, who just last year suggested “future work should continue not only to consider “punishment” more fully from the perspective of ordinary people, but to think about the implications their experiences and perceptions should have for the ways the justice system functions in practice, particularly in places where the civil and criminal justice systems intersect” (Young et al., 2024). This is particularly urgent in spaces where legal domains intersect—not only at the much-discussed civil–criminal boundary, but at the equally consequential interface between criminal and administrative law.

By foregrounding both the performative construction of parental identity and the epistemic marginalization of parents’ knowledge, this article highlights how hybridity is not only a matter of overlapping statutes or procedural regimes, but also of embodied, interactive practices that sustain state power over time. Attending to these practices—and to the impossible standards they impose - reveals how hybrid legal systems can entrench dependency under the guise of support. Future research should continue to trace these dynamics across domains, identifying the varied forms the performative submissiveness catch takes, the ways epistemic injustice is embedded in the legal process, and how legal design might avoid reproducing them.

Future research might therefore pursue two directions. One is comparative: to examine whether similar performative dynamics emerge across other problem-solving or quasi-therapeutic legal settings, including family courts, treatment courts, housing courts, and welfare-review proceedings. The other is normative and institutional: to ask what meaningful participation would require in legal spaces where speech is formally invited but epistemically conditioned, and where the promise of care is tied to continued submission. Such questions are especially pressing in legal systems that increasingly seek to solve social problems through courts while leaving intact the structural inequalities that help produce those problems in the first place.

This article has focused on one such setting. Its claim is not that juvenile courts are reducible to punishment, or that all courtroom interactions operate identically. It is that courts designed to help may also govern through the staged terms of helping itself. Attending to those terms makes visible a central socio-legal problem: when care is conditioned on institutionally subordinate forms of participation, the promise of voice may become part of the mechanism through which dependency is reproduced.