Imagine your grandfather and uncle being brutally murdered by the Taleban when you are just three years old, and then your parents and baby brother go missing, presumed tortured and killed.

This is Hassan’s story, and the youngster, now seven, is just one of the many people being cared for by the Freedom from Torture charity (formerly the Medical Foundation for the Care of Victims of Torture).

On Saturday, Witney-based choir Voice Box is holding a concert at St Barnabas Church in Jericho to raise funds so that the charity can carry on helping people like Hassan.

As always with Voice Box, this will be an eclectic programme, ranging from the political to the light-hearted.

“The choir’s known for having a real variety of music, including classical music, swing numbers and musical theatre numbers, so we’ll try and stick to that,” says musical director Lesley Morris. “But for this concert we will have one set that could be called protest songs that have a political message.

“In the second half we’re doing an interesting setting of Coleridge’s Kubla Khan, a couple of Shakespeare songs and then some lighter stuff. “We’ll probably spring the audience a bit of a surprise - they’ll have to join in something, with one half of the church singing against the other half. People do need to go out with a skip in their step and feel they’ve had a nice time, not go out feeling terribly mournful and despairing.”

The concert also includes a couple of readings by guest poet Olivia Byard, whose poetry has been widely published both in the UK and overseas, with her first collection, From a Benediction, being nominated for the Forward prize for Best First Collection.

The driving force behind the concert is the Oxford branch of Freedom from Torture. The coordinator, Kennington resident Halcyon Leonard, is a retired medic who is passionate about the charity’s work.

“For people who arrive in this country who have been tortured, the most important thing is that somebody actually listens and believes them,” she says. “Asylum seekers arrive with nothing and have been through horrific things, but for a lot of them it’s incredibly difficult to actually tell anybody what they’ve been through. It needs very special people to get them to talk.

“So the thing that appeals to me is that people are actually being listened to and helped to come to terms with what’s happened to them.”

One of the charity’s biggest challenges is to raise awareness of a problem that many believe no longer exists. “There’s evidence coming in all the time, and it’s not getting any better, unfortunately,” Halcyon says sadly. “There’s new evidence coming in from Iran, and in Sri Lanka there’s been appalling documentation of what’s been going on since the war ended.

“So we see our support group’s role as making people aware that there is a problem, and fundraising. That’s what we try and do with these concerts, and we find we get very warm support.”

Where and When

Concert in aid of Freedom from Torture

St Barnabas Church, Jericho Saturday, 7.30pm

Tickets: 01865 510036 or visit www.voiceboxchoir.co.uk

For more information about the charity, visit www.freedomfromtorture.org. For details of the Oxford support group, email halcyon.leonard@ntlworld.com