Rap and drill music give voice to the pain of life in a world of violence, and YouTube is the new amphitheatre | Ciaran Thapar

In ancient Athens, tragic stories brought catharsis, a purging of emotions through art. Today, music helps teenagers process traumatic, stressful lives

How should we understand violent songs, beyond simply calling them the creation of a folk devil? There must be another way. Because in my youth work with teenagers over the past decade - which has included mentoring many rappers with experience of serious youth violence - I've come to view the narratives of music as a force to be harnessed and critiqued, not suppressed and censored.

In my search for solutions, including looking at how music forms have been effectively criminalised, I've found it helpful to trace the etymology of a word and idea that's repeatedly used in common parlance but rarely interrogated: catharsis.

Ciaran Thapar is a London-based youth worker and author of Cut Short. He writes about youth culture, social change and city life and has a weekly newsletter called ALL CITY, in which a version of this article first appeared

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