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The street we're in stands in the middle of a few blocks that have seen three murders in recent days, and countless more in the previous months and years. "Can't no anybody park up on this block," says Shango, who beneath his dreads wears an expression of mournful unflappability. His companion, TJ, a former prisoner and one of CeaseFire's more seasoned outreach workers, tells me that summer is the "killing season" because there's no refuge for grievances. In winter the freezing weather forces people inside, where tempers have time to cool.

The team was called the violence interrupters, and its job was to mediate street disputes so as to stop the escalation to weapons use, injury and murder. The interrupters don't take sides, they're not police informers, and they don't seek to challenge gangs, drug distribution or other criminal activities. They simply aim to intervene at critical points to enable both sides in a conflict to take a step back. The motivating ethic for all their work is that violence need not be the inevitable outcome of street squabbles.

Although it may sound like a recipe for recidivism, the programme has had very few disciplinary problems. "We've had about 300 violence interrupters," Hardiman calculates, "and we've only had five guys lapse back into the lifestyle."

This sense of having entered someone else's life made it all the more disturbing to learn that Gates's brother Curtis, who appeared in

; for Kotlowitz it was his book

. For fans of that series, Cobe is Bunk, and Lil' Mikey is Michael Lee, the baby-faced schoolboy gangster from series 4. "Great analogy," says James, joining in on the game. "And Flamo is Omar. Except not gay. Renegade guy, not affiliated, but does what he need to do and is sharp as a whip."

In person she's just as impressive – quick, perceptive and teasingly flirtatious – but she also reveals a vulnerability that takes not just me but herself by surprise. "My mother was a baby when she had me," she tells me when we meet at the CeaseFire offices. "She was a baby having a baby and my dad was a baby producing a baby."

Her parents split up when she was a baby, and her mother wouldn't allow Fort to see his daughter, getting friends to say she was away whenever he called round. "He wanted to see me," Matthews says, and I suddenly notice a tear streaking down her face, followed rapidly by another. She says she has tried hard to forgive her mother but it hasn't been easy because she didn't provide maternal protection. Her mother set up home with another man who abused Matthews. "He violated me and she believed him, not me," she says, wiping away a tear. "She protected him, not me."

If violence is to be viewed as a disease, then it's undoubtedly a contagious disease. The conflicts of Chicago's south side are not a unique phenomenon. They're also to be seen in New York, Detroit, Los Angeles and Baltimore, as well as in London and other British cities, where youth and gang killings have escalated in recent years. Environment plays its part, though you'd be hard pressed to find the segregated hopelessness of Chicago's ghettoes in even the most deprived areas of urban Britain. The germ of violence is also carried by a variety of media, such as film and music, in which image and that most precious social commodity – identity – can be labelled, packaged and exported round the world. Fashion, it seems, can be just as stubborn an opponent as poverty.