Claudia Serban, “Limits of Empathy, Limits of Alterity ? The Challenges and Shortcomings of Empathy with respect to Children and in Child Abuse Situations”, Human Studies, 2025.
The alterity of children seems to raise some peculiar problems for empathy: the child is an alter ego whose difference is often regarded as abnormality or deficiency, and whose relation to adults is ineluctably asymmetric. Accordingly, two related threats endanger the respect and the acknowledgment of the child’s particular otherness: the denial of her subjectivity, as well as domination and violence. The paroxystic expression of these interconnected threats can be found in child abuse situations, which deserve special consideration from the standpoint of a phenomenology of intersubjectivity, embodiment and intercorporeality. At the same time, questions can be raised not only about the child abuse perpetrator’s lack of empathy for the child victim, but also about his or her own call for empathy. Combining a phenomenological approach inspired mostly by Husserl and a feminist approach that makes use of Foucault, the paper first attempts to show that the specific alterity of children and their subjectivity can and must be acknowledged in spite of the variations in embodiment between adults and children. The second moment of the inquiry defines the response of adults to the children’s peculiar otherness in terms of responsibility and care, and analyzes the potentialities for domination and abuse implied by the power of adults over children. Finally, the third and last part of the paper deals with the limits of empathy in front of the moral alterity of child abuse perpetrators, relying on Neige Sinno’s reflexive endeavor in Triste Tigre.