A culture of physical abuse at a Salvation Army boys' home in Adelaide was a significant barrier to children reporting allegations of sexual abuse, a royal commission has heard.
Senior Salvation Army official Floyd Tidd says he can't understand why such a culture was allowed to continue at Eden Park in the Adelaide Hills.
"I can't account for why it was allowed to flourish," Commissioner Tidd told the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse in Adelaide on Monday.
"I can't comprehend why it was allowed to continue to happen."
Commissioner Tidd agreed that physical abuse was so frequent and conducted so openly at Eden Park that it was one of the reasons why children were reluctant to come forward with allegations of child sexual abuse.
He agreed that it served to intimidate boys.
The inquiry had previously heard that children were regularly sexually abused at Eden Park and also at other homes run by the Salvation Army at Box Hill and Bayswater in Melbourne and at Nedlands in Perth from the 1940s to the 1980s.
One former resident at Eden Park, Graham Rundle, told the commission last week that he was abused more than 200 times.
In other evidence on Monday the royal commission heard that no disciplinary action was taken by the Salvation Army over a complaint that boys were locked in a small dark room for punishment at Eden Park.
A government inspector went to Eden Park in 1970 after a complaint that boys were locked up for hours at a time in a room that was only about two metres long and a metre wide and had no windows and no light.
Despite use of such a room being against Salvation Army regulations at the time and the complaint being largely substantiated, no action was taken to discipline those involved.
The inquiry heard that the head of Eden Park at the time told authorities the room had only been used in an isolated case.
The commission is continuing.
