Four years ago, Charlie Alcock was spat on, ignored, had pebbles thrown at her and was suspected of being an undercover police officer by the north London gang she was trying to strike up a conversation with by hanging around their fish and chip shop of choice.
The incongruity of a privately educated, academically high-achieving, white woman raised in rural Gloucestershire appearing from nowhere and saying she wanted their help was clearly not lost on the group of two dozen or so urban young men, who had struggled to stay in school and spent most of their days smoking cannabis and getting into trouble. It took six months before one member of the group even asked her, "in a not very polite way", what she was doing there.
Alcock, an NHS psychologist who wanted to start up a social enterprise tackling the causes of youth crime, gave him the short version: that although there were services aimed at his group, they weren't working. "And I think you know what works," she told him.