The details were almost too horrible to write. But these stories need to be told.

Warning: This post features explicit details of child sexual abuse, that could be triggering for some readers.

They were anally raped, beaten with canes and whips, and made to eat their own vomit.

They were humiliated when they wet their beds, forced to parade around the home in soiled sheets.

Some children as young as five were made to perform oral sex.

The victims were around 200 children – mostly orphans – all of whom were too young and too innocent to know how to stop to the heinous behaviour they were forced to endure.

The perpetrators were employees of the home, other residents at the home and members of the clergy. People in positions of trust. People who were charged with the protection of the young lives they so abused.

It happened at the North Coast Children’s Home in Lismore, New South Wales, over a period of 40 years from 1944 and 1985.

These horrifying details have come to light recently as part of the Royal Commission Into Institutional Responses to Sexual Abuse, which is currently taking place around Australia. The Commission was announced last year by former Prime Minister Julia Gillard in response to what she described as a historically systemic failure to respond to allegations of child sex abuse in Australia and to protect children from it.

The Commission will look into allegations of sexual abuse of children in care of various groups like the Catholic Church and state care and not-for-profit organisations. It will also look at the responses of child services agencies to allegations of abuse and is not expected to announce its findings until at least 2015.

Yesterday, the Commission began a public hearing into “the response of the Anglican Diocese of Grafton to claims of child sexual abuse at the North Coast Children’s Home in Lismore”. The hearing will continue until the end of next week but the stories that have already come out, are almost too disturbing to comprehend.

Let’s start with the story of a man who goes by the name CK. He told the hearing yesterday:

When I was three years old, in 1949, I was placed in the North Coast Children’s Home. At that time I was with my brother, who was six years old, who was also placed in the home, and I stayed there until February 1958.

During my time at the home I was physically, psychologically and sexually abused. I also saw other children in the home being abused. As a result of this abuse, I felt worthless and that I must be a bad child.

When I was about eight years old, my brother was taken away from the home. No-one told me why at the time. I later learned that he was sent to another home for some reason or other. I was not allowed to contact him again.

It was very traumatic being separated from him, as he was all I had left and he had protected me at the home.

I became extremely introverted and would not speak to anyone. If anyone talked to me, I would just cry and I felt so alone and scared. I did not see my brother again until a chance meeting at Luna Park when I was 17 years old. My brother did not recognise me at that time.

The effects of the home have been with me all my life. Throughout the 1980s the memory of my treatment in the home began to come back to me more and more. I have been diagnosed with dysthymic depression and have attempted suicide on more than one occasion.

He continued:

Coming here today is what I call a bitter-sweet situation. Bitter because I have to reveal publicly for the first time the things and the events that went on at the children’s home. I have lived a life that very few people knew, and to come here today to make this public is a very big move for me.

Sweet because it will open everything up, and for the people that committed suicide because of these events, including my brother, that will make it sweet.

So that’s why I came here today, was to open this up. It’s not about any money. The pain that we have, we will take to the grave. The ones that have suicided – they’re possibly the lucky ones. We’re the living dead that remain.

I think the church failed their duty of care. They said they had compassion and looked after us.

CK is one of seven former residents of the children’s home who will give evidence at the hearing which, as mentioned previously, will look at the Anglican Church’s response to the allegations of what occurred between 1944 and 1985.

“I lived in the Children’s Home for almost fourteen years and most of those years were complete and utter hell,” Mr Campion said.

“During that time I suffered horrifying, cowardly physical, verbal, emotional and sexual abuse from the staff, clergymen and, especially, from the Matron in charge.”

“These pitiless people ruled my life, and many others, with such brutality it can be only classed as horrendous and heartless without any regard for human life – let alone the well-being of a child.”

Mr Campion launched action against the Church with around 40 other victims in the mid 2000s. But after legal costs, the Church’s settlement offer of $825,000 in 2007 only equated to around $10,000 per person.

”I decided, after having dreams about children being beaten at the end of their beds, that I had to do something,” he said.

According to the ABC,  the Anglican Church acknowledged its failure to do more in response to the claims before the Commission began.

“We allowed ourselves to get caught up in legal responsibilities instead of looking at the people and their needs and in the end for us, it was a failure of love,” chair of the professional standards committee for the diocese of Grafton Reverend David Hanger said.

“At the heart of the Christian ethic is the ethic of love,” he said. “We as a diocese, in our response, didn’t model Jesus.”

The Commission continues and is expected to hear from more victims as well as Rev Dr Phillip Aspinall, Primate of the Anglican Church in Australia and Archbishop of the Diocese of Brisbane.