Girls were molested by older residents on movie nights at a Victorian youth training centre as staff turned a blind eye, an inquiry has heard.
Witness BDF said she never reported the abuse she experienced and witnessed at the Winlaton Youth Training Centre in the late 1980s.
"I thought that the abuse was just part and parcel of living at Winlaton," she told the child abuse royal commission.
Placed under the care of the state when her mother decided in 1986 that she no longer wanted the 13-year-old, BDF was sexually abused by a girl she shared a room with at Winlaton.
BDF said she was also sexually abused while held down in a seat by girls from the high-security Goonyah section at the weekly movie night.
She said she believed the four staff members in the room would have been able to see her being taken down to the front row by the older girls.
"On the nights when I wasn't taken down to the front row, I saw other young girls being taken to the front row by the same girls," she told the commission.
Another former Winlaton resident, Gabrielle Short, said she believed staff at the centre knew about the sexual abuse and did nothing to protect the children.
"They just walked the other way," she told the commission on Friday.
"They turned a blind eye. They took no steps to protect me or any of the other girls being abused."
Ms Short said she witnessed gang rapes at the facility after being admitted as a 14-year-old in 1970, and was made to undergo strip searches and intrusive medical examinations.
The 59-year-old said the physical, sexual and psychological abuse she suffered during 17-and-a-half years in institutions, including beating by nuns as a young child in Nazareth House, still affected her greatly.
BDF said while she was living on the streets, her caseworker sexually assaulted her before he would hand over her weekly ward cheque.
She said no department social workers ever checked on her while she was in Winlaton or foster homes.
"The effects of the abuse and neglect that I suffered whilst a ward of the state have been ongoing my whole life," she said.
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