French victim steps forward after Austrian incest

Abused Austrian woman sheltered by authorities

Meaux, FRANCE (AFP)

Frenchwoman Lydia Gouardo was beaten, raped and burned with acid by her father for 28 years, bearing him six children, but the 45-year-old says the world turned a blind eye to her ordeal.

As Austria reels from the horrific discovery that a 73-year-old man locked up his daughter for 24 years and fathered her seven children, an eerily similar case went this month before a French court of appeal.

From the ages of eight to 36, Gouardo was tortured and repeatedly raped by Raymond Gouardo, her legal though not biological father, bearing him six children, without setting off alarm bells in the village of Crecy-la-Chapelle, east of Paris.

She says the abuse -- which came to light after her father's death in 1999 -- started the day her stepmother plunged her in a scalding bath, inflicting third-degree burns that forced her to be taken out of school.

In an interview broadcast Tuesday on French radio RTL, Gouardo said she was raped "in the morning, in the evening and the night" in full knowledge of her stepmother who simply asked her husband to "get on with it."

Years later, when she tried to run away from her abusive home, she says her father started to burn her with hydrochloric acid, on the legs, arms and stomach, in punishment.

Yet as in the case of Austrian Josef Fritzl, neither neighbors, teachers nor social services thought to raise the alarm, despite the young woman's pregnancies and repeated spells in hospital for injury.

This month an appeal court toughened the sentence handed to Gouardo's step-mother at the original trial in March 2007, handing her a four-year suspended prison sentence for failing to prevent decades of abuse.

Today, Gouardo lives in a tumble-down farmhouse in the town of Coulommes, east of Paris, with seven of her nine children. Barely literate, unemployed, she hides her burn scars under long-sleeved clothes -- but says she is happy to have survived.

"I live from day to day. But I love life. When people complain, I say life is beautiful," she told RTL. "I am fighting back now. When a bill comes through the door, I am happy. I am here, I exist."

Austrian family

Meanwhile, the Austrian woman and children held in a windowless cellar for years in an incest abuse case are being treated in a specially segregated container and could need weeks of special treatment, experts said Tuesday.

Their segregation would protect them from the bewilderment and shock of being confronted with a world they knew little or nothing about for all those years, child and youth psychologist Paulus Hochgatterer told ORF public television.

Josef Fritzl, 73, confessed on Monday to imprisoning his daughter Elisabeth, now 42, in three cramped underground rooms beneath the family home for 24 years, police said.

Fritzl has also admitted fathering seven children she had, one of whom died shortly after its birth.

Three of the surviving children had never left the dungeon where they were kept captive and had never seen natural daylight.

Three other children were legally adopted by Fritzl and lived with him and his wife Rosemarie upstairs in the family home, totally unaware of the fate of their siblings imprisoned in the cellar below.

"Only very gradually are they being exposed to the outside world," he said, adding that "given the circumstances, they're actually doing quite well."