Sam Troth

um things escalated and and and his uh his sort of his I guess his um his true intentions shown through and he started um doing things to me and yeah 9 to 13 yeah so how did you get through it I don't it's a good question like

Afterwards, drugs, violence, antisocial behaviour.

During the abuse, you know, like I said, there was elements of enjoyment in these weekends that I would spend or when I went there for the school holidays.

And then there was moments of trauma, you know, so...

Focusing on those other activities that we were doing would have been helping I guess now looking back and then just trying to basically survive through that period of time and then go back to home which was safe.

I, um, I just, when I started, when I, when I, when I started working on myself, which was about 2019, really, really trying to work on myself.

Um,

And I started getting help, and then I started looking into the issue of sexual violence.

It became bigger than me.

So what is this in totality?

What does this look like in our community?

And the statistics just blew my fucking mind.

At one stage, I felt like I would have been the only kid at my school that it happened to, but yet it would have been happening.

Statistically, it was 20% of the kids I grew up with.

of the boys you know and 33 of the girls but i thought i was all alone is that because you didn't talk about it yeah you know when you're going through it did you just keep it all to yourself yeah yeah so i didn't tell anyone about it um first person i told was my best mate and i was about 15. um

And then I told my family when I was released from prison when I was about 19.

I told my family for the first time, yeah.

So...

One of the hardest or one of the biggest things that hangs over me, and I know that it's out of my control, but after he did it to me, obviously he carried on doing it to other people.

He went to Australia.