ABSTRACT
This chapter investigates how risk is created and managed in the context of human trafficking and my participants’ lives in Mindanao. The violences that people experience, and the ways that people interpret and navigate this setting, are both significant to an understanding of risk. In discussing risk, I first query the idea of “at-risk,” particularly as it is typically used in the context of human trafficking. The idea of compounding violence suggests that violent events – whether structural or direct – damage a person’s life-world in a way that makes them more likely to experience further violence. The idea of “at-risk,” then, can be considered a euphemism for compounding violence as it erases, or neglects to take into account, the violence that has occurred – and may still be occurring – in an individual’s life and focuses instead on the future. Precarity, risk, and vulnerability generally refer to the likelihood, and unequal likelihood, of negative outcomes; structural, compounding violence instead emphasises that future risk emerges from some form of violence that is already present. Human trafficking and related forms of exploitation thus reveal the structural violence inherent to the ordinary social realities that people navigate day to day.
