Are social rights knocking on the door or are there new forms of regulation of poor women? The new welfare service in Brazil and its recipients

Poor women, especially mothers, have historically been target of regulation from public power so that they can discipline the rest of the family as collaborator of the state. In Brazil, welfare system has recently been organized to permit its universal and continuous access, breaking its tradition of offering punctual services. In this sense, three levels of social care services have been established based on the level of complexity of social vulnerability. The purpose of this paper is to analyze what is called "low complexity services", whose target is composed by poor families living in areas classified as "highly or very highly vulnerable" in a social point of view, as well as women's role to carry out this new approach to population that traditionally has been excluded from social rights. In a local level, assistance offices have been set and a social work team established to attend registered families, including home visits by street level caseworkers. In the Brazilian city of Sao Paulo, the service is outsourced to NGOs, which implies a blurring of the boundary between public and private and impacts on its users according to the characteristic of each organization. A case study about a protestant organization that, as partner of the municipality of Sao Paulo, implemented a family assistance program reveals how this new policy leads, at least locally, to the (re)production of "deserving poor" and "undeserving poor" categories. In this sense, in the context of modernization of social policies in the country, the access to social rights seems to paradoxically go on a par with a new form of regulation of poor people and, ultimately, to lead to a production of new form of inequalities between welfare recipients, women in the majority of cases.