I DON’T know why, but sometimes the small, understated details are the most affecting. Thirty-six pages into the first report from the Scottish Child Abuse Inquiry, Lady Smith talks about birthdays. “To children, home should mean a safe place where they know they will find unconditional loving care provided by adults they can trust,” she writes. “A place they will find light whenever life outside has grown dark; a place which does not fill them with fear; a place where they will not suffer abuse.”

Judged against this aspiration, the Daughters of Charity of St Vincent de Paul stand condemned this week. Utterly condemned.

Many schools have a roll call of student achievements on their walls. Races won, trophies taken, lives lived on after childhood. Smyllum Park and Bellevue children’s homes have no such memorials. Shuttered as they may now be, these “caring” institutions leave behind them only a butcher’s bill of brutality, co-ordinated cruelty, of old bones of little children, lost in shared graves, without so much as a crumb of stone to mark their passing.

But turn back to birthdays. Turn back to page thirty-seven. Having read about the physical, sexual and emotional abuse children experienced at the Lanark and Rutherglen orphanages between 1917 and 1981, the inquiry’s description of marking the birthdays of these kids may seem a little curious.

After the bruises and the bleeds, the broken limbs, broken spirits and broken childhoods, isn’t a missed birthday a minor detail in a much wider, sadder story? Maybe.

Much has been written about the redeeming quality of small kindnesses. But Lady Smith’s findings are a commentary on how a succession of minor cruelties can break a heart too.

Reflecting on the impact of isolating children from their relatives, she writes: “The lack of family contact could have been ameliorated in a small way by maintaining a central register of children’s birthdays and ensuring that they were celebrated but that did not happen.

“Although birthdays were celebrated at some periods, in some of the units – with a cake, for example – some children’s birthdays were never acknowledged at all.

“Some children did not even know when their birthday was.”

That detail caught me by the throat. It’s one snag among many. Lady Smith is right. This is a painfully eloquent indifference. One indifference of many.

You know what it says. Nobody loves you. You are unworthy of love. All you are worth is the lash of the tawse, the lick of the crucifix, the crisp report of a tortoise shell hairbrush on your knuckles. Birthdays are a little token of your personal significance.

Cards say that you’re somewhere being remembered. A voice from outside the regime, calling you back to life.

Stifling that thin voice is a cruelty. And recognising that cruelty reflects the emotional intelligence this first Scottish Child Abuse Inquiry report has shown.

Lady Smith has been given a formidable mission by the Scottish Government, tasked with investigating “the nature and extent of abuse of children in care in Scotland” from “within living memory” up to December 17, 2014, with a view to creating “a national public record and commentary on abuse of children in care in Scotland” during this period.

The concept of “abuse” is widely conceived, including “sexual, physical, psychological and emotional abuse” and – where she determines it is relevant – “other types of abuse including unacceptable practices such as deprivation of contact with siblings and neglect.”

The darkness Lady Smith’s first chapter of evidence has revealed this week is coal tar, pitch.

The extent to which many of Scotland’s caring institutions were factories of inhumanity – mass-producing broken children – is individually and collectively indicting.

This week’s report confirms Smyllum and Bellevue were places which took the admonition to “suffer little children” as a cue to wield the switch, the birch and the belt.

To crucify the little kids in their care every day. Lady Smith found the men and women responsible for these institutions were not applying the best – broken – wisdom of their time, but administering corporal punishment with a cruel abandon which would make even the 1960s pale.

How we memorialise the past matters. Part of Lady Smith’s job is to set the record straight. She made a powerful start this week in rewriting the historical record. She didn’t flinch.

Legal writing can be bloodless; legal judgments, emotionally deadening. Verdicts can be tombstones – chilly monuments to monumental losses.

Too often, the law is generally an incomplete photographer of human experience. Its snapshots inevitably leave out more than they capture. The faces are blurred, the feelings muted. Most of the human detail – gone.

But this report seems different. To her immense credit, Lady Smith hasn’t composed her findings in emotionally flat legal language. She’s been more courageous. Her findings are carefully formulated in human terms. Measured, yes. Judicious, certainly. But living.

On almost every material point, Lady Smith rejects the testimony of living Sisters about the circumstances which prevailed in these homes.

One Smyllum nun characterised the orphanage as a “very happy place”. Another described it as a “happy kind of carefree house where children were cared for, loved and looked after”.

“That may be their perception, or their hope,” writes Lady Smith, “but I cannot accept that it displaces the powerful evidence that, for many children, that was a far cry from what they experienced”.

Time and again, the judge found the living Sisters evading, “minimising” and unremembering essential debates about how the children in their care were treated.

The details of what happened stretch credulity. “Children were wrongly told that their parents were dead or had gone away or they were not given news of their parents.”

“I didn’t even know I had a mother until she turned up at the door” a graduate of Smyllum writes.

One child whose mother died in childbirth was branded a “mum killer” by one sister as she beat him. Girls having their first period were forced publicly to display the stained sheets, wee girls, who know they’re bleeding, who think they’re dying, left none the wiser about basic biological functions.

Sick kids were effectively waterboarded with porridge. Bed-wetters and run-aways were tormented.

Everywhere, the bully’s eye seems to have been trained on opportunities to break down and humiliate these tiny friendless creatures, whose lives had almost all already taken a jarring course. The inquiry described emotional abuse as an “established aspect of the regime” at both institutions. It was, Lady Smith found, “designed to hurt and belittle children. It was very cruel.”

I’m sorry to inflict all this upon you on a Sunday morning. If you flinch reading these stories, if you feel green reading about the black work of too many of these sisters – these daughters of charity who betrayed their vocation, these inverted, bloodless, blood-stained carers – I don’t blame you. If part of you is howling out “look away”, I know the feeling.

But don’t. I beg you: Don’t turn away. Don’t change the channel. Don’t turn the page. This is just the first chapter of many. Just the first finding of many which Lady Smith will make.

For humanity, for truth, for the sake of all those lonely children who met only suffering and terror at the hands of institutions consecrated to their care – force yourself to look.

We have a political culture which is easily outraged by nonsense. A political culture which too often can barely find a breath of outrage about real scandals.

So look now. Through tears. Though your stomach churns. Look.