Children and Marginalization: Reflections on Arlene Lo’s “Hermeneutical Injustice and Child Victims of Abuse”

I am in almost complete agreement with Arlene Lo (2022). Child abuse victims surely suffer hermeneutical injustice if they are denied the concepts necessary to understand their experience, and that injustice is immensely harmful. In this reply, I offer an amendment to Lo’s use of Sally Haslanger’s distinction between manifest and operative concepts. I then raise some wider questions about the hermeneutical marginalization of children. The work that has so far been done on epistemic injustice against children has focused mostly on testimonial injustice. It is time to give more attention to hermeneutical injustice.