A French village meets woman who killed her father 19 years later

Ida Beaussart returned to the village of Salomé in northern France at the weekend for the first time in 19 years.

She was there to attend a special screening of a film that depicted the days that led up to her killing her father, Jean-Claude, in July 1989.

"I was frightened about coming back here, about appearing in front of you," Beaussart told the 500 or so people who had crowded into the village hall, which had been transformed into a cinema for the evening.

"I feared you might hate me and treat me like a murderess.

"All I ask is please don't leave before the film has finished. What you're going to see is what I lived through."

And what they sat through together with Beaussart for the first time, was a film that touched everyone present, as was clear from the report carried on prime time national television news on Sunday evening.

The film "Pleure en silence" from 2006 wasn't just an imaginary tale that would fail to touch the local population. It was the true story of how the then 17-year-old Beaussart finally broke down and shot her sleeping father, thereby ending years of misery, humiliation, terror and violence he had directed towards her, her four sisters and her mother.

In 1992 she was acquitted of murder - a verdict that might on the face of it appear shocking But the full facts behind the case revealed a childhood that was full of fear, beating and indoctrination.

The cruelty within the family had been common knowledge at the time, but nobody had tried to stop it, and even today Beaussart insists that the outcome had been "inevitable".

At her trial it emerged that most people in Salomé and the neighbouring villages knew about the violence to which Beaussart and the rest of the family were being subjected.

She and her sisters and her mother were hit, insulted and humiliated on an almost daily basis. Her father was a neo-Nazi who had been thrown out of the Far-right Front National and who kept weapons in the house. The girls were made to salute a picture of Hitler every morning.

It also transpired that the conspiracy of silence seemed absolute because everyone was afraid of Jean-Claude Beaussart. He had the reputation of being a violent man, and even though he was known to police and had served eight months in prison for inciting racial hatred, they too appeared to be frightened of him.

"We heard crying in the house. We were all terrified of him," one woman who used to live next door to the family told the regional daily La Voix du Nord immediately after the weekend screening of the film.

"One day we wanted to intervene but he threatened us with a gun. Even the local police were afraid of him."

Beaussart's teachers and the social services also failed to step in, even though they were aware of what was happening.

"When Ida came to school with a spilt lip, I told her to go to see social services," Véronique Trouwaurt a childhood friend who hadn't seen Beaussart for 19 years told the paper.

"But nobody reacted."

Almost 20 years later some in the village still don't really feel they were completely to blame for having remained silent. One man, when interviewed, said it should have been the job of social services to intervene, as they knew what was happening.

In spite of her ordeal then, and the psychological and psychiatric treatment she underwent afterwards, Beaussart doesn't seem to hold a grudge.

"I understand why other villagers didn't react," she said. "Many of them had children and they must have been frightened of my father.

"But if people had perhaps had been a little braver, then yes they could have done something," she added.

And that was really the message the now mother-of-two, with a third on the way wanted to get across by the end of the evening - that others, elsewhere, break their silence if they are aware of similar cases of abuse.

"I don't want any other child to have to cry out like that and not to be heard."