Mongolia’s first nationwide survey on gender-based violence reveals high rates of violence against women across the East Asian country. One in 10 women experienced nonpartner sexual violence before the age of 15, and 1 in 4 women, regardless of her social and economic status, agreed that a husband may beat his wife if she is unfaithful, according to the national report published Thursday.

They are sobering statistics for a vast country where very little was previously known about the prevalence and patterns of violence against women (VAW) and domestic violence, according to Naomi Kitahara, country representative of the United Nations Population Fund’s Mongolia office, which provided technical support for the survey process.

Among married women or those with an intimate partner, nearly 60 percent experienced one or more forms of violence — whether physical, sexual, emotional, economic, or controlling behavior. More than 30 percent, meanwhile, have experienced physical and/or sexual violence in their lifetime.

This made Mongolia’s VAW data collection particularly sensitive, and underscored the need for enumerators to receive intensive, context-specific training. Ninety-five women enumerators, some of whom have been victims of violence themselves, trained for three weeks, before setting out across Mongolia’s rugged landscape to interview women from 7,860 households across all of the country’s 21 provinces. The enumerators not only learned how to correctly enter data into tablets, but also the best strategies to seek out private spaces to conduct confidential interviews — and importantly, how to support women who become emotional while sharing their stories.

For Naomi Kitahara, the new data offers concrete evidence that the scant police reports detailing just 1,120 domestic violence victims in 2017 represents severe underreporting. The survey estimated that closer to 118,000 women with partners experienced physical or sexual abuse in the past 12 months, and It’s likely the number of unreported cases is even higher if factoring in nonpartner violence.