When the Child Is Not Heard: Children's Rights and Epistemic Injustice in Paediatric Nursing Practice

Children's dignity in hospital care is often framed as a matter of privacy, etiquette, communication, or procedural compliance. A more demanding account is needed. Drawing on the philosophical framework of epistemic injustice, this conceptual article argues that dignity-related harms in paediatric nursing also arise when children are denied credibility, interpretive support, or meaningful authority over knowledge of their own embodied experiences. Children may not always describe pain, shame, embarrassment, fear, or boundary violation through adult-like verbal testimony. Their experiential knowledge may instead appear through silence, withdrawal, humour, bodily resistance, hesitation, gaze avoidance, or apparently compliant behaviour. When such expressions are dismissed as immaturity, difficulty, exaggeration, or non-compliance, the child is harmed not only as a vulnerable patient but also as a knower. This reframing connects paediatric dignity with children's rights to participation, privacy, and respect under the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child and the EACH Charter. It also positions paediatric nurses as central agents of epistemic repair because nursing work occurs at the intersection of intimate bodily care, sustained relational proximity, communication, documentation, and advocacy. The article proposes an epistemic justice practice bundle for paediatric nursing: credibility-oriented listening, embodied attunement, developmentally attuned communication, protected communicative spaces, minimal substitution by adult proxies, and voice-preserving documentation. The analysis extends nursing philosophy by showing that dignity is not only protected around the child but co-produced through relational practices that make children's experiences visible, credible, and actionable within clinical care.