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"Where is everyone?"

"Oh, they're all playfully splashing each other in the super-steamy communal shower."

First off, the homeless population is about 70 percent male. To illustrate the problems with that, Alice shared a story about the first shelter she went to. Right off the bat, it was basically the setting of a goddamn Resident Evil game. "Long Island Shelter is an old abandoned army hospital that was at one point a psych hospital, then a TB hospital, and was finally repurposed to Hell on Earth and eventually reclaimed by Satan last October," she says. "It's where you go when you have no choice. You get on a crowded bus, literally filled to capacity. They take you to a random creepy wooded area, and split half of you off onto a second bus before taking you up to the compound proper."

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But even an honest-to-God abandoned asylum in the middle of the woods didn't compare to what we all know is the real hell: other people. "You're dropped off at the entrance to the emergency building and race off the bus and force your way through a sea of people, most of whom are men," Alice says. "There are about two beds for men for every one for a woman."

John Tlumacki/The Boston Globe

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Sound bad? It's actually gotten even worse for Boston's homeless since Alice's time there.

Remember what happened to Alice at that bus depot? Can you blame her for being a little uncomfortable being surrounded by men on the set of a horror movie? It's not an unfounded fear: Fully half of homeless women have experienced sexual assault. About one in seven were raped in the last year, and about one in 10 in the last month. Alice only turns to coed shelters as an absolute last resort. "Specifically because I'm a sexual assault survivor, I stay as much as possible in women-only or LGBTQ spaces," she says.