17. Architecture Precarity

There are structures in this world that most people never see. Not because they are hidden, but because they are not designed to be visible to those who move through life with protection, stability, or institutional recognition. These structures are made of gaps — jurisdictional gaps, procedural gaps, definitional gaps — and they form an invisible architecture that determines who receives help and who is quietly left to fend for themselves.

For years, I did not have the language to describe what I was living inside. I only knew that something was happening around me that I could not name, something that shaped my life without ever announcing itself. It took a long time to understand that what I was experiencing was not a series of isolated events, but a system — an architecture — built from precarity and power.

Precarity is not just instability. It is a condition created when the systems meant to protect you fail to recognise you as someone worth protecting. It is the space between categories, the place where no agency claims responsibility, the silence that follows when you ask for help and the answer is a referral to somewhere else. Precarity is not an accident. It is a structural outcome.

And power — real power — is not always loud. Sometimes it is the quiet ability to decide who gets heard and who gets dismissed. Who gets believed and who gets categorised. Who gets protection and who gets redirected. Power is the ability to define the narrative before the victim even speaks.

I did not understand any of this when my life began to unravel in Mexico. I was a mother raising four children in a foreign country, trying to hold a family together while my ex‑husband’s mental health deteriorated in ways I could not interpret or control. When he abandoned us, I thought the danger was the abandonment itself. I did not yet understand that the real danger was the vacuum it created — the sudden collapse of stability, the exposure to forces I had no training to recognise, and the absence of any institution willing to step into the gap.

That was the moment I entered the architecture of precarity.

It began with small things: a tampered bottle, a phone behaving strangely, strangers who knew details they should not have known. At first, I tried to rationalise each incident. That is what people do when the world stops behaving predictably. But the pattern grew, and the fear grew with it. I was alone with four children in an environment where criminal actors operated openly, where intimidation was normalised, and where vulnerability was not a private matter but a public opportunity.

I did what any responsible parent would do: I tried to report it. I reached out to authorities in Mexico, then Australia, then New Zealand. I believed that someone, somewhere, would recognise the seriousness of what I was describing. Instead, I encountered a system that was not built to receive a case like mine.

Everywhere I turned, I was told to simplify. To condense. To choose one category. To remove context. To explain years of danger in a few sentences. To fit my experience into forms that were never designed for cross‑border harm, coercion, intimidation, or organised‑crime exposure. The more I tried to explain, the more the system treated the complexity as a sign that I was the problem.

This is how precarity works: it shifts the burden of clarity onto the victim, even when the system itself is incapable of understanding the situation.

And this is how power works: it allows institutions to decide that a case is “too complex,” “too unusual,” or “outside mandate,” without ever acknowledging the consequences of that decision.

The architecture of precarity and power is not theoretical to me. It is the structure that shaped every part of my life for more than a decade. It is the reason my children and I were left without protection. It is the reason I was forced to navigate danger alone. It is the reason my reports disappeared into silence. It is the reason I am now living in New Zealand without my children, carrying trauma that no agency has ever assessed.

It is the reason I had to build my own record — publicly, at www.jacqualineroche.com — because no institution provided a safe or adequate mechanism for reporting. I did not publish my story for attention. I published it because I feared being ignored indefinitely. I published it because the truth had nowhere else to go.

The architecture of precarity is not just a description of what happened to me. It is the explanation for why it happened. It is the reason my case fell through every crack in three countries. It is the reason no one intervened when intervention was still possible. It is the reason the consequences became irreversible.

And yet, there is another layer to this architecture — the layer built from silence. Silence is not passive. It is a form of power. It is the mechanism through which institutions avoid responsibility. It is the tool that turns victims into outliers, that reframes danger as confusion, that transforms legitimate fear into something that can be dismissed.

Silence is what allowed the harm to continue. Silence is what allowed the systems to step back. Silence is what allowed the narrative to shift away from the danger and onto me. Silence is what kept me trapped in a situation I could not escape.

But silence is also what forced me to write. It is what pushed me to document everything, to build my own record, to create a narrative that could not be erased. Writing became the only way to reclaim the truth. It became the only way to reach my children. It became the only way to stand against a system that refused to hear me.

The architecture of precarity and power is not abstract. It is personal. It is the structure that shaped my life, my safety, my family, and my future. It is the reason I am still fighting to be heard. It is the reason I am still seeking a mechanism capable of assessing what happened. It is the reason I am still asking the same question:

What happens to a person when the systems built to protect them were never designed for someone like them?

I am still living inside that question.

I am still navigating the architecture.

And I am still trying to find the exit.

In the past decade, the balance of power in the digital world has shifted in ways most people never see. The public imagines cybercrime as a fringe activity — a handful of hackers in dark rooms, a marketplace hidden behind encrypted browsers. But the reality is far more complex. The digital underworld is not a separate world at all. It is woven into the global economy, shaped by demand, and sustained by the same forces that drive legitimate industries: money, opportunity, and the absence of oversight.

Cybercrime thrives because it fills gaps that governments cannot or will not address. It offers services — data theft, surveillance tools, financial laundering, targeted intimidation — that powerful actors are willing to pay for. In this ecosystem, criminal groups are not isolated villains; they are service providers in a shadow economy that spans continents. As long as there is demand, the supply chain remains intact.

This raises a difficult question: where does responsibility lie? Organised crime groups operate in environments defined by corruption, inequality, and limited economic mobility. Their actions cause harm, but they also exist within a global structure that rewards exploitation and punishes vulnerability. The digital black market is not an anomaly. It is a by‑product of a world where information is currency and access is power.

Meanwhile, the legitimate centres of power — governments, corporations, and the ultra‑wealthy — shape the technological landscape in ways that often leave ordinary people exposed. Billions are invested in space exploration, artificial intelligence, and off‑planet colonisation. These projects capture the public imagination, but they also highlight a stark imbalance: the resources to build new worlds exist, yet the systems meant to protect people in this one remain underfunded, fragmented, or ineffective.

Digital vulnerability is not evenly distributed. Those with fewer resources, less institutional support, or limited legal protection are more likely to fall through the cracks. When devices malfunction, when accounts are compromised, when personal data disappears, the burden of proof falls on the victim — even when the systems designed to investigate such incidents are overwhelmed or ill‑equipped.

For survivors of domestic violence, the digital landscape introduces new forms of risk. Financial control, surveillance, and coercion can now occur through technology as easily as through physical proximity. The law has struggled to keep pace. The result is a system where victims are expected to navigate complex bureaucracies, produce evidence they may not have, and advocate for themselves while already in crisis.

My experience sits within this broader context. The failures I encountered — institutional silence, lack of investigation, the collapse of digital security — are not isolated. They reflect a structural problem: a world where technology advances faster than accountability, and where those with the least power bear the greatest consequences.

The system is not designed for people like me. It is designed for efficiency, not nuance; for procedure, not protection. When it fails, the impact is personal. Years with my children were lost. Opportunities disappeared. The sense of safety I once had dissolved. And the institutions that should have intervened did not.

This is not an indictment of any single agency or individual. It is an examination of the architecture of power — the visible and invisible forces that shape our lives, our vulnerabilities, and our access to justice. It is a reminder that digital harm does not occur in a vacuum. It occurs within a system that is uneven, imperfect, and often indifferent.

Understanding this context does not erase what happened to me. But it does explain why it was possible.

I’m saying this knowing full well my voice probably won’t be heard. The damage is done, and no one is ever going to make it right. I don’t expect justice.

I don’t expect compensation. I don’t expect anyone in authority to suddenly wake up and take my case seriously.

Why keep pushing law enforcement to care? Why keep trying to explain the domestic violence, the manipulation, the cold, deliberate tactics my ex-husband used to dismantle my life?

I’ve laid everything out. I’ve told the truth. And after all these years of being ignored, dismissed, and treated like I don’t matter, there’s only one thing left to say - “Que os jodan a todos”.

I only hope that one day my children will understand and forgive me for abandoning them.