It was a program former British prime minister Gordon Brown called "shameful" in a 2010 apology to the child migrants Britain sent to countries like Australia, New Zealand and Canada.
In London, an Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse has now begun public hearings into the scheme, which led to about 130,000 children being sent overseas.
The lawyer assisting the inquiry, Henrietta Hill, has summed up what was involved.
"Child migration programs were large-scale schemes in which thousands of children, many of them vulnerable, poor, abandoned, illegitimate or in the care of the state, were systematically and permanently migrated to remote parts of the British Empire."
A former managing director of the ABC, David Hill, and his two brothers were among the children sent to Australia.
Mr Hill and his siblings were sent to the Fairbridge Farm School at Molong, New South Wales.
He has told the inquiry the children endured loveless childhoods.
"The typical Fairbridge kid was only 8 or 9 - and some were as young as 4 - when they were sent out to Fairbridge Farm School at Molong, never to see their parents again and to endure an entire loveless childhood with nobody ever putting an arm around them giving them encouragement or warmth. You will hear that these younger children were the least protected, the most vulnerable and the most abused."
Mr Hill struggled to maintain his composure while outlining his hopes for the inquiry.
"The second thing I hope this inquiry can do is promote an understanding of the long-term consequences and suffering of those who were sexually abused. Many never recover and are permanently afflicted with guilt, shame, diminished self-confidence, low self-esteem, fear and trauma."
Mr Hill has interviewed people who spent time at Fairbridge and says he believes more than half suffered sexual abuse.
(Hill:) "I've put the figure at over 60 per cent of the kids that went to Fairbridge were sexually abused."
(Reporter:) "Sixty per cent?"
(Hill:) "Sixty per cent. And I think, if you look at the conditions that prevailed in the other child migrant institutions, I'd be staggered if the figure isn't equally high or even higher in some of the Catholic boys homes in Western Australia."
Another child migrant sent to Australia, Clifford Walsh, has described outside the hearings how he has been burdened with what he calls 60 years of hate.
"I've lived for 60 odd years with this hate. They sent us to a place that was a living hell. We were 60 miles from Perth. We had no parents, we had no relatives, and there was nowhere we could go. These paedophiles must have thought they were in hog heaven. It has to be brought out. Seventy years ago, 60 years ago, 50 years ago, they didn't want to know about it, the politicians didn't want to know about it. They wanted to put it in the too hard basket. And because they didn't want to know about it then, there's no reason why people shouldn't know about it now."
