ReadA Book Podcast- Vikki Petraitis The Reckoning

I think you were a teacher to start off with when you first got the publishing yeah it's incredible congratulations

31 years yeah for 31 years out of my career I taught full-time and I wrote books you know holidays and nights and weekends and But they're all true crime and true crime, I think it was good that I had a full-time job because I never had to worry about will this make money or will this be popular? I was very focused on these are the stories that I want to tell and these are the stories that need to be told.

So one of the books that took me a year to write was called Rock Spider about child sex offences and I was writing it with the head of the Child Exploitation Squad in the Victoria Police.

So we wrote the book, or I wrote the book, and he sort of compiled statistics and gave expert advice because it's like, well, here's how offenders target children.

All parents need to know this.

Now, I knew that that book would not sell wild numbers.

Some bookstores wouldn't even have it on the shelf.

You had to ask for it and get it in a paper bag.

And it wasn't explicit on purpose, but it certainly went, here's how offenders target children, and this is what you need to know.

And it sort of blew up the whole notion that You know, we taught stranger danger in the 90s at schools.

You know, when we compiled statistics, I think looking back, 94% of offenders were known to children.

So not stranger danger.

We were teaching kids the wrong thing and that the squad had compiled the statistics for the book for the first time.

I think this is going back 25 years, but I think 54% of offences took place in the home of the child.

So not only were they known to the families themselves, But these offenders were knocking on your front door.

And just as a teacher and as a parent, we needed to know this.

But, you know, I never had to worry about, gee, is this one going to pay for itself or is it going to pay for my year of research? And they never did.

But I had a teacher's salary, so it didn't matter.

And that allowed me a freedom, I think, that maybe some writers don't have to try and hit something popular.

And then when I started my PhD in 2017, I thought I'm going to try fiction and I'm going to a all of the things that had horrified me as a true crime author.

Conviction rates against crimes against women and children are so low.

They're almost like 1% or 2%.

Imprisonment rates are below 1%.

And now, you know, when I was researching Rock Spider, underreporting was 80%.

And now the Australian Bureau of Statistics put it at 92%.