Village Health Defense: Self-Protection Framework | SOF News

"Building on Village Agency, Village Health Defense utilizes the value of villagers’ own collective knowledge, expertise, capacity, and insights as well as their pre-existing Village Agency techniques/activities to strengthen and extend collective villagers’ skills, abilities, techniques, and confidence necessary to also protect themselves from adverse health outcomes which may be associated with hostile/detrimental interactions with Burma military units. Village Health Defense seeks to intervene to modify/disrupt the relationship between the human rights abuses by Burma military units, and associated adverse health outcomes with actions over which villagers have more control and a lower probability of catastrophic effects despite the obvious power disparities, especially in the use of violence. Thus, Village Health Defense tries to carefully integrate those health self-protection techniques/activities which are less dangerous and over which villagers have more control."