The creative writing faculty of America’s Virginia Tech University has new guidelines for teachers to use when assessing students’ work. “Is the work expressly violent?” they are asked. “Do characters respond to everyday events with a level of violence one does not expect, or may find even frightening? Is violence at the centre of everything the student has written?” Similarly, in colleges all across the US, teachers are now asked to inspect creative writing for violent tendencies and to guide authors of such work towards counselling and even medication.

It seems a strange response to creative work, especially if one considers contemporary British theatre. From the linguistic and emotional menace of Harold Pinter’s first plays to the infamous baby-stoning in Edward Bond’s Saved, from the anal rape in Howard Brenton’s The Romans in Britain to a soldier eating a journalist’s eyes in Sarah Kane’s Blasted, violence has often been a dominant theme on stage.

“Yes, I thought they were good,” I overheard a member of the audience say, as she left my play cycle Shoot/Get Treasure/Repeat. “But that poor playwright. He must be so unhappy to write about such a horrible world.” I laughed about this later with the actors, who

reassured me that I am an averagely balanced and reasonably happy person.

Yet many of the key moments of the plays are undoubtedly violent and upsetting. If written in a Virginia Tech class, these scenes might lead to me being counselled, or perhaps medicated. There may be an element of the personal, even the therapeutic in this writing, but they are, above all, political plays.

Young people are sensitive to the inequalities of our society, to the daily reports of the Iraq war and its futile violence. This will surely find its way into their work.

We can’t tell them that only grown-up writers can use brutal words and imagery. Those of us

working with young writers can help them to craft and contextualise violence, but we mustn’t ask them to repress it.

This would only greatly increase any capacity for instability and lashing out. It would stand as much chance of causing as it would of preventing future shootings.