Ariuntuya Tamjid runs the One-Stop Service Centre in Bayanzurkh district in Ulaanbaatar. She worked for 23 years with the police Child and Family unit, but she came out of retirement to set up one of the integrated centres for domestic violence support. With discrete safe-houses closer to the communities, the centres have helped women and girls access the complex range of services they need to stay safe and recover, even during the pandemic.

Ariuntuya says before the network of community-based One-Stop Service Centres were established, there were only two shelters in Mongolia - one at the police headquarters and another run by a local NGO called the National Center Against Violence - to cope with domestic violence.

"The capacity of those two facilities was not enough to provide protection services for survivors," she says. "Every day, there were calls and cases of domestic violence. Usually, we would record their data and try to contact their relatives."

She says without a dedicated facility and 24-hour staff equipped to handle these cases, women coming at night would have to wait until morning just to get to speak with a trained officer.

"Sometimes cases could turn up at the police station in the middle of the night, but we had nowhere to accommodate them," she says. "We had to leave them to sleep on chairs, and officers on duty shared their own food with the survivors, then we had to wait until morning before we could register their cases."