Epistemic Justice for Children

Sor Juana's works explicitly argue for women's epistemic authority—the right to be recognized as capable of true knowledge and reasoning. Children face similar epistemic injustice: their observations, experiences, and understanding are routinely dismissed because of age. When a child reports abuse, is their testimony credible? When a child identifies injustice in classroom teaching, is their observation taken seriously? Epistemic justice means recognizing children as knowers whose experiences give them legitimate insight. This doesn't mean treating children as having equivalent knowledge to trained specialists, but rather respecting their particular knowledge—about their own experiences, their community, their needs. Applied to children's rights, epistemic justice means designing child-responsive research and policy development where children are consulted as experts on their own lives. It means taking children's reports of abuse seriously, investigating their claims thoroughly. It requires training adults to listen with the assumption that children are trying to communicate truth, not fabricate. Sor Juana demanded recognition of her intellectual capacity; children need recognition of their epistemic worth. When we dismiss children's voices, we enable their exploitation and prevent them from protecting themselves.