Cheyanne and James Chalkley were both arrested after bruises were found on the children by authorities: Bexar County Jail

A father in Texas has been arrested after he was accused of subjecting his two daughters to a campaign of horrific abuse.

James Howard Chalkley is accused of making his five-year-old daughter brush her teeth with faeces and wear a shock collar, and flushing his 10-year-old daughter's head in a toilet.

The 32-year-old from Converse, Texas has been charged with one count of injury to a child while his wife Cheyanne Chalkley, the children’s stepmother, has been charged with two counts of injury to a child.

As reported by the Dallas News, authorities were alerted to the abuse on 19 September when the five-year-old girl reached for a box of crayons at school, exposing bruising on her lower back.

At first she said she didn’t know how she got the bruises but her 10-year-old sister told a Bexar County sheriff’s investigator that their father spanks them when they misbehave, according to an arrest warrant.

The CPS removed the two girls and their three-year-old brother from the family home.

During interviews and medical exams the two older children revealed more about the abuse they had suffered.

The 10-year-old had bruises on her upper thighs and buttocks and said her father and step mother hit her with belts, their hands and “switch” made from sticks from a tree in their garden.

The statement also said sometimes the sticks had thorns and on at least one occasion her father shoved her head into a wall.

The child also recalled an incident when her father asked her stepmother if he was too hard on the children. Cheyanne Chalkley reportedly replied that if they were her own kids she would hit them more.

She said Chalkley also held her head in the toilet, flushed it and did the same to her younger sister.

The five-year-old said her father also used a shock collar on her, like the kind for dogs and made her wear it on her arms, legs and back which left green marks on her skins, the affidavit stated.

She also said the adults would “take turns” when spanking her.

James Chalkley was arrested on 5 October. The CPS had previously been in contact with the family twice, once in September 2016 when the children were left unsupervised and then in January 2017 when Chalkley allegedly sprayed the children, who were naked, with cold water outside the house on a cold day.