Between social rights and human rights: Israeli mothers’ right to be protected from poverty and prostitution

In the aftermath of 2003 welfare reform, mothers who have to provide for their children under the conditions of poverty and deprivation of their social rights of citizenship were constraint into locating survival solutions that violate their human rights. The violation of one's human rights in the context of violations of mothers' social rights of citizenship was proposed to have two different meanings. Ruth lister saw it as a form of excluded citizenship and Regev-Messalem understands it as a manifestation of claiming citizenship. Lister's theoretical argument connects the deprivation of mothers of social rights to forms of Othering that becomes a major mechanism of exclusion. In contrast Regev-Messalem's understanding of mother's insistence on belonging interprets mothers' political claim for citizenship as taking the form of welfare fraud, justified by mothers on the ground of an ideology of motherhood and assumption of the state's obligation to provide support. The non-normative survival strategy that risks mothers' right for autonomy on their bodies - provides a particularly relevant case contrasting meaning of exclusion and belonging in it. Thus, we analyze in this paper one case of a non-normative form of survival: payment of rent by the coin of sexual interaction. The interview was selected out of a qualitative study with 45 women who struggle to provide for their children under poverty. Our analysis of this case conceptualizes the conditions under which women's human rights for autonomy on their bodies is violated forcing their bodies to provide the coins of survival. Our analysis of this case allows us a dual result: next to the emerging process in which sex/money exchange becomes the only rational survival options we engage with the theoretical debate so that we can map the relationship between exclusion and belonging.