Sam Troth

After he was doing it to me and it got to a point where I basically, without saying I'd had enough, I let him know I'd had enough.

And shortly after he left the country, left working with my dad and left the country and went to Australia and he was caught doing it over there and did some jail time and was deported back to New Zealand.

He was caught doing it here again and did a short term of imprisonment and then he was caught doing it again and now he's serving preventative detention.

So he's got to serve 15 years without parole before he's eligible for release.

So I haven't personally laid charges against him and I will be pressing charges when he gets released so that he doesn't get released back into the community.

He'll go back onto remand and that's something that we've come up with when I spoke to the police a few years ago about it.

That was the plan we came up with because otherwise if we push charges now, it'll just be concurrent to a sentence he's already serving.

So to get the maximum benefit, we're going to hold off.

What ended up, where did your life end up?

So sort of my main, to start with, my outlet was violence and disruption and disruptive behavior.

So school was off the cards real quick as soon as the abuse, as soon as my abuser had gone, I really acted out.

And so quite quickly ended up in child youth family custody, boys homes, family homes, and then secure unit in Wellington and in another youth facility in Auckland called Youth Link and spent most of sort of between 14 and 16 in those places.

further abused by the state um what recently with our royal commission of inquiry into faith and state-based care the un declared that the use of self self-containment of children or secure blocking away children was was a form of torture

Um, and it happened to pretty much every person that went into residential care.

I spent nine days in cell confinement, um, before I was put in with the other children.

And then, um, you know, basically it's like the Lord of the flies.

You get put in your place, get beaten up, bullied.

You figure out where you go in the, in the, in the herd.

And then, um, before too long, you're the one doing the bullying as well.

So it's an ugly, vicious cycle in, in state care.