Between Social Rights and Human Rights: Israeli Mothers’ Right to be Protected from Poverty and Prostitution

In the aftermath of the 2003 neoliberal welfare reform in Israel, impoverished mothers who have to provide for their children in a situation that deprived them of their social rights of citizenship have been forced to choose survival solutions that violate their human rights. Lister regards such violations as a process of social exclusion indicating second-class citizenship, whereas Regev-Messalem's process of claiming citizenship, suggests active insistence on inclusion. We propose that the non-normative survival strategy that risks a mother's right to control over her body provides a particularly relevant case for the conceptualization of excluded citizenship as accompanied by a sense of privatized entitlement. Narrative analysis of one interview from a qualitative study of 50 women struggling to provide for their children in poverty, we explore a non-normative form of survival: the payment of rent in the coin of sexual relationship positioning women between exclusion and belonging. Through this case, we explain the social process in which the violation of social rights becomes a violation of women's human rights.