The Social Limbo Protection Between Support and Security

Abstract

It is possible to realize the existence of a social protection gap between the catchment areas of social security and social assistance; a ‘limbo’ in which the citizen is unaided by the State, and an interpretation of the scope of detached welfare of economic and social realities experienced by (and in the) Brazilian State in this early twenty-first century, and yet grounded in the restrictive legal interpretation and limited state capacity characteristic of protection from the beginning of the 1990s. Social inequality is a key factor in maintaining poverty levels and legitimizes the adoption of socially exclusionary practices that gets benefits from the social exclusion reality in order to further aggravate the very social inequality as to conform the excluded population a mindset that allows the distinction of society into privileged and excluded groups. This intuitive understanding is reflected in the interpretation of public policies for social protection restricting the scope of social security and justifying a restrictive interpretation of the Constitution as well as the perpetuation of outdated understanding of an opposition between security and legitimizing assistance and enabling as acceptable a consistent social protection limited to integrated workers into the formal productive system, partially complemented by social assistance.