One-Stop Crisis Centre (OCC) — Bangladesh's Hospital-Based Model for GBV Survivors

Bangladesh's One-Stop Crisis Centre (OCC) opened in the emergency block of Dhaka Medical College Hospital on 19 August 2001, the result of sustained lobbying by women's organisations together with the Royal Danish Embassy in Dhaka and five government ministries. It was designed to provide medical care, counselling, legal support and temporary shelter in one place for women and child victims of domestic violence, burns and sexual assault, including on-site legal aid to help survivors file cases without having to navigate police and court processes separately. The model has since been extended to other hospitals, including Chittagong Medical College Hospital.
An early cross-sectional study at the Dhaka OCC (June 2006–May 2007, 284 victims) found husbands responsible for 46.5% of cases, violence more prevalent among rural (81%) than urban (19%) victims, and physical assault the most common presenting harm (50.4%), followed by sexual assault (36.6%) and burns (13.0%).
A 2025 peer-reviewed study of the Chittagong OCC (124 victims, 2022) found medical care rated "strongly good" by 68.5% of respondents and overall management positively rated by 83.1%, but identified "critical gaps in Bangladesh's GBV response, particularly in legal and financial support services," with financial assistance the lowest-rated component and unmarried women and adolescents reporting comparatively lower satisfaction — a documented, honestly-reported limitation of an otherwise long-running model.

Read the full analysis: https://www.sciencepublishinggroup.com/article/10.11648/j.ajhr.20251303.12