On Miranda Fricker’s influential account, the central case of testimonial injustice occurs if and only if the speaker receives a credibility deficit owing to identity prejudice of the hearer. Her critics have taken issue with her view, arguing that cases in which speakers are given more credibility than they deserve, may also amount to testimonial injustice. Furthermore, they argue, these cases cannot be captured by Fricker’s account of objectification as the primary epistemic harm of testimonial injustice; rather, it is an (...) account of othering that best captures a wide range of epistemic injustices. In this paper, I join Fricker’s critics in advancing a novel case of testimonial injustice through identity-prejudicial credibility excess – the adultification of black girls in testimony-giving settings. When testifying, black girls are likely to receive a credibility excess with respect to adult topics such as sex and consent because they are perceived as older, more self-reliable, and mature than they actually are by the hearers. Nevertheless, when examining the girls’ intersecting social identities defined by age, race and gender, it becomes clear that this constitutes an unjustly and prejudicially inflated estimation of their credibility. These cases also involve hermeneutical injustice since the identity-prejudicial credibility excess denies the victims a meaningful opportunity to make sense of their traumatic experiences of sexual assault. I conceptualize this compounded injustice as testimonial obfuscation, where an identity-prejudicial credibility evaluation (either in excess or deficit) causes an experience to remain unintelligible to the hermeneutically marginalized speaker. (shrink)

Au sein des séparations parentales conflictuelles, l’enfant peut adopter un rôle de parent. La parentification est une conséquence fréquente de ces situations. L’article présente le cas clinique d’une jeune fille de 12 ans illustrant l’articulation entre sa situation familiale et le phénomène de parentification. Marie est prise en charge en centre-médico-psychologique suite à une injonction de soin émise par le juge des enfants. Au sein de la séparation conflictuelle de ses parents, elle apparaît comme la soignante et la confidente de (...) sa mère. Elle cherche à aider cette dernière par divers moyens tels que le soutien moral, le rejet du père ou encore la rupture de liens avec sa famille. Des programmes éducatifs mandatés par les tribunaux, des programmes de prévention ou des discussions avec les parents dans les écoles sembleraient pertinents afin de diminuer la parentification. (shrink)