Faith

In the 60s, John was eight when his family life broke down. His mother thought it best for her son to go into care, but could not foresee the horrors that awaited her infant child.

The children there attended St Mary's Church in Maidenhead where they went twice on a Sunday and also on a Wednesday evening for choir practice.

But what awaited John was not the love of a Christian church, but the filth of a bunch of paedophiles who congregated at St Mary's.

"My first experience of a Christian church was in fact a paedophile ring," John tells BBC Berkshire.

"From the age of 10 I was serially raped and rented out to homosexuals for sex."

Inquiry into church child abuse

His interview on BBC Berkshire comes in the same week that saw the publication of the long-awaited inquiry into child abuse by Roman Catholic priests.

John Affleck

It found that thousands of children had been abused over a 60-year period. The report also found government inspectors failed to stop beatings, rapes and humiliation.

In 2008 John accepted a substantial out-of-court settlement from the Royal Borough of Windsor and Maidenhead for the abuse he received in the 60s at the council-run Green Field House.

Read the BBC News Online story here:

"It's incredible that these things are kept behind closed doors and when they do come out in the public domain people are just astounded," says John.

"But in my experience, when these things happen to children they suppress these feelings. There's the guilt and shame that's involved with it and they keep it a secret."

Psychological damage

The continuous sexual assaults had caused severe psychological damage to the young John.

"Due to the severe abuse I received and a number of the other lads received in that home, the way it affected me is I didn't have any boundaries, I didn't know how to behave within society."

The headmaster at his school told his mother: 'Your son is useless his life will never amount to anything. He will probably end up sleeping in a ditch'.

"When the headmaster made that statement to my mother, really he wasn't lying. He just said what he saw," says John.

"I'd been at that school for a year and attack four or five male teachers, and I'd ended up bludgeoning a six foot five woodwork teacher with a lump of four by two - and that's the reason I got expelled."

When he was 15 he bottled a grown man in a pub after a disagreement playing cards. By 22 he'd been arrested in three different countries and served four prison sentences for violence.

Finding God

"My life pretty much went on like that, an ongoing train crash, until I got to my mid-30s."

After failed businesses and failed relationships he called out to God one Friday evening in January 1993.

"My thought was: To hell with it, I will give my life to J... - and I just got the J of Jesus out when in that moment of time God met me, saved me and loved me.

"It was then that I realised that I all ever really wanted in life was to be accepted and loved."

Forgiveness

For five years he obsessively read the bible. And with one of the main themes in the bible being forgiveness, John has remarkably been able to come to terms with what his attackers did.

"I can wholeheartedly say that I forgive these men that abused me in that children's home," he says.

"People say: how can you do that? It's impossible. And I would agree - it is impossible for a human being to forgive like that.

"But when a human being like myself has seen what Christ has done for an individual person, that must affect my response and how I deal with other people."

John has now written a book on his experience, called Abuse, and runs a successful bible school with his film The Glory Story, used in more than 50 different countries.