Christina Patterson: Can rap and rhyme beat the knife and the gun?

"Poetry" said WH Auden "makes nothing happen". He should have been in Whitechapel earlier this week. On a rainy Tuesday morning, in a packed hall on a council estate, children rapped and rhymed and sang of their disgust for a culture of violence that's blighting their lives.

"What are we here for?" the performance poet Crisis asked the assembled throng. "Hate crime!" the children yelled back. And after the imposing Brixtonian had warmed us all up with two mesmerising raps about the seductions of the street, they all trooped on stage to strut their stuff. Some of them shuffled up to the microphone and some of them grabbed it. Some of them mumbled and some of them soared. But every single one of those 70 children, from four schools in Tower Hamlets and Hackney, took their turn.

"I watch the darkened vibes and I watch them erase more young lives," declaimed a slight, mixed-race boy with a huge grin and track-suit bottoms cut for someone half his age and height. "I say to myself should I go or should I watch?" mused a bright-eyed Asian boy in a poem about a knifing. "Education's going to open the gate," rapped a gangly black boy sporting a baseball cap and a large pink comb.

For two hours, it went on: this sparky, funny and profoundly moving creative outcry against a culture that seems set to crush. Three of the schools, Morpeth, Hackney Free and Parochial and George Green's, are extremely ethnically mixed. One of them, the Central Foundation for Girls, is 70 per cent Muslim, a high proportion of its pupils wearing headscarves to match their diamante-studded jeans. One read a poem about the veil. Another gabbled about paradise and the prophet. Another declared, a touch alarmingly, that "those British should be banned". Well, at least she was being honest.

The event was the culmination of Dividing Lines, a project organised by Subtext, a community arts organisation working with young people in the inner city. Two performance poets, Joelle Taylor and the British Nigerian rapper and hip-hop artist, Breis, have been working with Raj Bhari, a "community cohesion expert", to run workshops exploring creative approaches to conflict. Judging by Tuesday's exuberant performance, and the high-decibel enthusiasm of the participants in the interval, it has been a great success.

But that, of course, is not how you can judge the success of such projects, which are only a drop in an ocean whose currents seem increasingly hard to resist. For every Stephen Lawrence, Damilola Taylor, Anthony Walker or Tom ap Rhys Pryce, there are hundreds which never hit the headlines. Every week brings new examples and new theories. The young people who commit these casual crimes are "thermostatically impaired". They are evil. They are seeking a thrill. They are damaged. They are bored.

Clearly, some are damaged. They have, as St Dave has so kindly pointed out, little parenting, little love and little hope. And yes, many are bored. But most of all they're just doing what their culture tells them to do. If you grow up in certain parts of London, in a state of extreme frustration and anger, then "steaming" (threatening and robbing people on the Tube) and "shanking" (stabbing people, usually in the leg) is just what you do. It's as normal as it is for a middle-class journalist to nip to the farmer's market for a pint of organic milk.

Dividing Lines is, thank goodness, just one of a number of projects aimed at young people at risk of violence. Others include Leap, a youth organisation which works with gangs, and Let's Be Positive, a north London-based music collective which this week won the Philip Lawrence Award, set up in memory of the murdered headmaster.

"It's a mental battle out there" Breis told me after the event on Tuesday. Yes, it is a mental battle - and a physical one, too - but, unlike other wars we could mention, this is a battle that we just have to fight.

Some food for thought (and health)

So you can be too rich or too thin. Well, perhaps not too rich - as Victoria Beckham currently swelling her coffers with a bestselling style guide (yes, style guide) might testify. Being able to fit into the jeans of a seven-year old hasn't stopped her producing three strapping lads or sprouting a pair of breasts that go considerably further than "that extra half an inch".

But she was lucky. Skinny women, according to a new study, are 72 per cent more likely to miscarry in the first three months than their more substantial sisters. In order to perpetuate the human race, women, it seems, should eat. Other factors which reduce the risk of miscarriage are, apparently, fresh fruit and veg (yawn), but also, more surprisingly, chocolate and marriage.

Nature is clearly a bit of a moral policeman, but doesn't mind the odd treat.

* Doctors get pots of it. MPs want to, but don't. Barristers are raking it in. But it's never enough, and it's never as much as your friends. Yes, we are all, it seems, suffering from what you might call Cherie syndrome, an affliction in which your considerable assets are metamorphosed beneath your gaze into abject poverty.

Except that we don't all have the six-figure pay-check. We say we do, but we don't. While pay surveys suggest that as many as three million people in Britain earn more than £100,000, the real figure, according to a leading pay research group, is 113,000. That's about one for every 800 people classified as disabled.

You wouldn't know it from what we see and read. We're bombarded with images of the rich, not just the sorry circus of celebs, but a media myth of comfort, which includes huge houses in Notting Hill, Mulberry handbags and Armani suits. Fantasy has its place, of course, but let's not confuse it with real life.

c.patterson@independent.co.uk

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