©Journal of Comparative Family Studies Volume XLVIII Number 3 Summer 2017 Between Social Rights and Human Rights: Israeli Mothers’ Right to be Protected from Poverty and Prostitution Einat Lavee * Orly Benjamin ** INTRODUCTION Social citizenship was established and protected in the Global North until the early 1980s with well-documented differences between welfare regimes. Since then, the serious retrenchment of social expenditures and a restructuring of welfare have become a persistent trend (Ajzenstadt, 2009). In Anglo-Saxon countries, more than elsewhere, the restructuring of the welfare system introduced a set of reforms implementing privatization and marketization in ways that undermined previously established social rights. Welfare allowances, unemployment benefits and other forms of state support for those in need were severely cut and difficult to obtain with the new eligibility requirements. These policies were justified by framing them as promoting economic self-sufficiency, personal responsibility and autonomy (Morgen, Acker and Weigt, 2010). Discussions of welfare restructuring usually focus on two aspects related to the relationship between women and the state: the persistent withdrawal of the state’s obligation to defend mothers’ rights (Skevik, 2005) and mothers’ struggle for their right to provide for and protect themselves and their children from poverty and its risks (Dodson, 2013). The first focus was best conceptualized by Lister in her understanding of second-class citizenship (2004: 165), defined as processes of exclusion from participation in mainstream society and its social, economic, political, civic and cultural spheres. Regev-Masalem (2014) recently demonstrated a different angle by focusing on the social process of claiming citizenship, where fraud in the form of false income reports, becomes a form of participation; A routine attempts to alter the social boundaries of citizenship, for example, by insisting on inclusion through negotiating and challenging formal eligibility for allowance. Citizenship, participation and exclusion are notions derived from T.H. Marshall’s (1950) definition of social citizenship. For him, if a democratic order is to be fully maintained, any citizen must be entitled to “the whole range from the right to a modicum of economic welfare * Department of Human Services, University of Haifa, Abba Khoushy Ave 199, Haifa, 3498838, Israel (elavee@staff.haifa.ac.il). ** Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Bar-Ilan University, Ramat Gan, 5290002, Israel (orly.benjamin@biu.ac.il). 315