UK child sexual abuse survivors take standup comedy courses

Survivors of child sexual abuse (CSA) are taking courses in standup comedy to help process their trauma, in the first such scheme in the UK.

The comedian Angie Belcher, the first person to get standup comedy prescribed on the NHS through her project, Comedy on Referral, ran the two-day programme in Bristol last week.

“Comedy is often tragedy plus time, and these are people who have already gone through major counselling, are in recovery and are now looking to do something different to keep themselves busy,” said Belcher.

“Saying that something is funny doesn’t mean it’s not sad or serious,” she said. Standup comedy can be part of recovery because it gives power back to the victim by laughing at their oppressor. So instead of going, ‘Oh God, that was terrible’, they can say: ‘You know what? The guy who raped me was a prick. Let me tell you why.’ And that’s funny.”

There are an estimated 11 million survivors of CSA in the UK. A recent report by the child safeguarding practice review panel found at least one in 10 children would be sexually abused before the age of 16.

CSA can lead to problems in later life, including addiction, post-traumatic stress disorder and personality disorders, long-term clinical psychiatric diagnoses and suicide.

Belcher has used comedy to address issues around CSA before. She has twice compered at the annual conference for the Green House, a Home Office-funded charity providing specialist support for CSA survivors.

Angie Belcher ran the two-day programme in Bristol this week. Photograph: Angie Belcher

It was that event that led her to start mentoring survivors after young people at the conference asked for her help writing standup comedy for a Green House CSA festival.

Gemma Halliwell, the chief executive of Green House, said: “Survivors need to find ways to hold the pain alongside hope, positivity and healing, and that’s where comedy can help. It’s really important that we support survivors to find their voice in a way that’s right for them: we don’t all need talking therapies or medication.”

Commissioned by the charity Southmead Project’s Active Recovery scheme in Bristol, 12 survivors used their trauma as a starting block to wrote comedy on Belcher’s course. She taught the young people to write jokes, discover their “comedic persona” and use their “inner comedian” in their everyday lives.

Ryan Moore has learned standup with Belcher through Green House and Active Recovery. “No pill that doctors have given me makes me feel as good as when I get on stage and talk about all the difficult things that have happened in my life,” he said.

Moore said that while there was “absolutely nothing funny about CSA”, he found it necessary to tell audiences about it as part of his act so they could understand the context of his “wild” later life.

“I don’t have one single joke about the abuse but it’s the context of my crazy adulthood, which is very funny,” he said. “When I’m so transparent and honest with the audience, I build a rapport. That’s so therapeutic that when I get off stage, I’m buzzing for the next week and feel so much more proud of myself than if I had to take a pill to survive.”

Jemima Foxtrot, the director of Kindreds Creatives, which runs creative workshops for survivors of CSA, said turning trauma into standup comedy was a “high-risk strategy” but one that for her had reaped “huge rewards”.

“When the abuse happened to me, I could barely say the words: when I told my mum, I had to write it down,” she said. “But because I’ve now tackled it repeatedly in my stage shows, I’ve finally got to a place where I can talk very openly.”

Viv Gordon, the artistic director of UpFront Survivors, a creative arts organisation that works to increase the visibility of adult CSA survivors, said: “Humour is a really big survival strategy for our community.”

She added: “For me personally, it was always a way of surviving, a way of being with unbearable pain and with the challenges and difficulties of having an experience that I couldn’t talk about.”

James MacKinnon from the charity Survivors UK also welcomed the course. “It’s not a one-size-fits-all approach but comedy can provide a powerful sense of agency and release, and a different perspective on difficult experiences,” he said.