Influential legal thinktank Justice has embarked on a groundbreaking project to prevent rap music being wrongly used as evidence in criminal proceedings.

Campaign group Art Not Evidence has long campaigned for limits on the use of creative or artistic expression in criminal proceedings, concerned that the use of rap and drill music by prosecutors is unfairly sweeping young black boys and men into the criminal justice system.

Justice legal policy manager Emma Snell told the Gazette this project complements Art Not Evidence’s work. The thinktank has teamed up with the University of Oxford and community organisation United Borders for the one-year project, which is being funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council.

The project has three phases. The first is peer-level research with young people in London to understand the music-making process.

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Snell said: ‘One of the things that has come up is the idea that there are lots of complex social reasons why people might make music. To legal professionals, it might seem violent or aggressive… but it could be young people making sense of their experience of interpersonal violence, things happening around them or their community – but they are not necessarily directly involved.’

The second phase will be a ‘creative output’, such as a film, with young people ‘that allows them to communicate in a way that’s accessible to legal professionals’ on their feelings around the stigma and criminalisation of music.

The third phase will be group workshops with legal professionals. Snell said: ‘We will be creating a test case, a track that touches on some of the issues that arise in terms of music as evidence. We will conduct analysis on how different professionals interpret that musical evidence.'

Snell added: ‘All of this will build into training for judges. Drill and rap music are quite popular genres but are vilified in the media. There’s a real tendency to view this music through a criminological lens because that’s the context people come into contact with. But the genre is dependent on convention, it has a rich history, a way for young people to find a level of catharsis, a way for young people to break out of the socio-economic circumstances they find themselves in.’

On identifying the need for judicial training, Snell said scoping work was done with legal professionals and some of them sat part-time as judges. The discussion identified a need to ‘better understand and appreciate earlier in the process - before having arguments around admissibility in the courtroom - the complexity and lives of these young people'.