It's 10 P.M. Do You Know Where Your Child Is?

Giora Katzir, acting chairman of the Association of Private Investigators and chair of the association's disciplinary committee, says that although most cases handled by private investigators involve matrimonial, insurance- and business-related matters - in recent years, he's heard about dozens of parents turning to PIs, and asking them to investigate their children's activities. Investigators who work in the field say that most of these requests involve children who are 11 and older, from well-off, educated and secular families, and that in a majority of cases, it is boys and not girls whom the parents wish to have followed. In most cases, the investigation is launched after the parents begin to suspect that their child is involved in some kind of criminal or shady dealings; but there are also parents who just want to check into whether their high school-age daughter is seeing a married man, or what their son's sexual orientation is.