For a long time, women of character were demonised in just the same way as witches or poisoners. Yet as far as ‘ordinary women’ are concerned, the collective unconscious rather tends to consider them as innocent, naïve, or victims. In Femmes Fatales, a genuinely impartial expert who has investigated hundreds of criminal court cases takes stock of criminality in the feminine, beyond its myths and clichés. It is indeed an averred fact that female criminality is currently increasing, and especially among minors; every year, around 166,000 women (among which 15,000 minors) are implicated by police and gendarmerie forces.
Avengers, infanticides, swindlers, psychopath teenagers, criminals for love, guilty of incest, parties to murderers or thieves: wiser for her experience, Michèle Agrapart-Delmas draws up the fascinating profiles of those women who, as the years go by, are still as frightening as men – if not more…
A psychologist, an authorised expert for the French Supreme Court (Cour de Cassation) and a law expert for Paris Court of Appeal, Michèle Agrapart-Delmas is also in charge of teaching and researching in the field of general and criminal psychology in university curricula. She is the author of From criminal expertise to offender profiling (Favre Editions, 2001, winner of the National Gendarmerie Literary Prize).
