Mary Hooker has a photograph of herself taken two days after she was released from Parramatta Girls Training School after a 15-month sentence in the early 1970s.
She is wearing a long-sleeved yellow blouse to disguise the damage done while in the home, which is now the subject of the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse.
“It is covering up all the scars on my arms and on my breasts where I would stick the needles into me so I could relieve some of the pain," she told the hearing.
Sent to the home aged 13 in 1972, Mrs Hooker said girls would steal pins and needles from the sewing room to self-harm because their treatment at the home was so harsh.
Now 56 and living in Cudgegong near Mudgee, she recalled being sent to the home's isolation room, known as the "dungeon", where she was allegedly sexually abused by three officers.
At times breaking down while giving her statement before the commission, presided over by Justice Peter McClellan, she said she had two children but had suffered 10 miscarriages due to her fragile health.
Mrs Hooker, who was supported by Reverend Bill Crews at the hearing, was one of the youngest inmates at the home and remembered how the rules were designed to dehumanise inmates.
“We had numbers, not names,” she said. “I was 127.”
Mrs Hooker went on to work as a welfare officer with the Department of Community Services and told the hearing she feared the abuses she experienced while in state-run care were still being inflicted on vulnerable children.
Another inmate, Janet Mulquiney, was so terrified of the prospect of going to Parramatta Girls Training School that she tried to jump out of a moving police car into traffic when she was being taken to the centre in 1970.
She was sent to the school after running away from her home in Balgowlah as a 15-year-old, being told “some time in an institution will do you good”.
Instead, she was sexually assaulted in the middle of the night by an officer whose identity she could not confirm. A teenager with no sexual experience, she was terrified.
“I just wanted to scream," she said. “I was scared. I was convinced I was going to die.”
But the perpetrator simply told her: “Keep quiet. Everything will be all right if you stay quiet.”
Mrs Mulquiney, now 59, said verbal abuse at the home was common.
“We were all treated as if we were dirty . . . we were told we were all sluts," she said.
The Royal Commission is also hearing evidence into the Institution for Girls, Hay, where inmates from Parramatta were sent for misbehaviour.
Witness Robyne Stone described conditions at Hay as particularly brutal.
“It was run like a concentration camp,” she said. “It was a place where you had to walk with your eyes on the ground. We had to march everywhere and we weren't allowed to talk.”
Mrs Stone was not sexually abused at Parramatta Girls but told the hearing she was raped twice at Hay.
Jennifer McNally, whose statement was read to the hearing, told of being sent to Parramatta Girls as a pregnant teenager and being punched in the stomach by a guard.
The inmates' stories have a harrowingly familiarity. Most were sent to Parramatta Girls for being “exposed to moral danger”. The evidence to the Royal Commission includes recollections of beatings, sexual abuse, harsh discipline and humiliating treatment.
Since leaving the institution, many women have battled mental illness, suicide attempts, marriage breakdowns, difficulty obtaining work and ongoing health problems but have received no compensation.
Of the 10 alleged perpetrators named in the hearing, only three are confirmed to still be alive: John Frank Valentine, who worked at Parramatta in the early 1970s, Noel Greenaway, a superintendent in the 1960s and a man who has not been named. Another alleged offender, a woman given the pseudonym PN, has not been located.
The hearing continues on Friday.
