Research on humans, most especially involving vulnerable populations, requires adherence to a set of ethical principles. A “good” research is evaluated on, among other things, whether it has been conducted in an ethical manner. This paper presents the ethics protocol developed for a memory work research3 involving teenagers orphaned as a result of the Philippine War on Drugs. It argues that research, especially when it involves vulnerable communities that have been subjected to violent killings and continue to be threatened, must move away from knowledge-extraction, and towards collaborative knowledge production between (academic) researchers and community participants. This shift requires that researchers recognize the community as partners in the research process, and as producers of knowledge, rather than mere sources of information or object of research. It also takes into account the security and protection issues that confront participants’ communities. This paper concludes that community-engaged research must be viewed as an emancipatory project that aims for empowerment and social justice. It advocates a process that is consciously sensitive to the existing security risks that may potentially aggravate participants’ realities, including the trauma that the teenage orphans may be suffering from.