I can be in a safe place,” she told me as we drank sweet-potato lattes at a campus café. The most important thing, in her view, is the absence of men. “Always, when I use the word ‘safe place,’ it means the place for women.”

I had a successful career as a chef and never had trouble finding a job or a place to live. Stepping over homeless people to and from work, a hatted restaurant in Sydney, was my first introduction to homelessness but there’s so much more to it than meets the eye…