Young boys were locked in a cage for days on end as part of a brutal regime of physical and sexual abuse meted out to dozens of youngsters at Salvation Army homes in the 1950s, '60s and '70s, a royal commission into child-sex abuse has heard.

And the Salvation Army's leadership often failed to discipline or remove the perpetrators, but simply moved them to other homes where they frequently continued the abuse.

The revelations came during the first public hearing in Sydney by the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse for 2014.

In his opening address, counsel assisting the commission, Simeon Beckett, said the focus of the hearings would be on the "contemporaneous response by the Salvation Army and relevant government agencies to child-sex abuse within the Alkira home for boys in Indooroopilly, Queensland; the Riverview Training Farm, also in Queensland; Bexley Boys' Home in North Bexley; and the Gill Memorial Home in Goulburn".