Some things are just harder for women, from getting a job to finding pants with real pockets to the basic human right to pee standing up. Even homelessness, already a firm zero on the Fun Scale, gets more difficult for women. We asked Alice Edwardson about those challenges, and she told us ...

5 Most Women On the Streets Are There Because Of Violence

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When Alice was in grad school, she found herself the unlucky target of a stalker. He started off as a neighbor with a tendency to overshare about his failing marriage. After some polite and uncomfortable head-nodding, his comments became more personal, culminating in him unwittingly hitting on Alice in front of her girlfriend.

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"That night was kinda the beginning of what most social workers would consider the more typical stalking behaviors," Alice says. "Following me on the bus, entering my apartment when I was out and taking things, lurking at windows, etc. The dude broke into my apartment multiple times. Once, when I was home in bed, [he] apparently [tried] to kidnap me. He was high as a kite, so I escaped easily."

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Turns out hard drugs don't really keep you sharp enough for a class A felony.

Clearly, it was time to put several states -- maybe a few small countries and an ocean -- between herself and this guy. "I spent about six months jumping around the country trying to find someplace I felt safe," she says. Safety is not exactly what she found: "I was ultimately committed to a hospital in Seattle for a couple of months. I started making my way back East to be closer to my childhood home, and was raped two days later at a bus depot."

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All of this left Alice with a heaping helping of PTSD, plus a side of relapse into the eating disorder she'd previously overcome. Grad school and the teaching job that had been paying her bills dropped to somewhere near "Suri Cruise's latest haircut" on the list of things on her mind. She isn't an anomaly.