Call the police about a domestic violence situation in the 1960s, and the response may have been sympathetic but often was not. People were told to work it out or sleep it off. Call the police about a domestic violence situation in the first decade of the 21st century, and the response is completely different: there will probably be an arrest and the victim will be told of social service and legal options.

The response to domestic violence has changed drastically and positively in a single generation. The domestic violence programs were founded in the early 1970s as shelters for battered women; the first one was in England but they came to the U.S. very soon. At that time, these shelters were designed for women to stay a few days because at that time no one really knew the kinds of services that would be most helpful for victims of domestic violence and their children. Shelters were often a project of the women’s movement and as such were marginalized in the world of social services in a community.

Relations with the police in those days were not generally strong for a number of reasons. One is that domestic violence runs are really dangerous for police officers and they were frustrated with having to deal with the same families over and over. At that point, they typically did not see the shelter as an ally and a service that could prevent violence towards officers. Another is that as a part of the women’s movement, shelters seemed strange and somewhat threatening to mainstream law enforcement.

In the first twenty years of their existence, shelters developed in a number of ways. First off, as shelter personnel listened to the needs of the people using their services, domestic violence programs changed. Families could stay longer than just a few days and ultimately some larger programs created transitional housing where families could stay for a year or two. Domestic violence programs began also to create legal advocacy programs with personnel who would go to criminal court with victims and who would explain what was going to happen and the victim’s legal options. They also began to create programs for the many children who stayed in the shelters.

Domestic violence programs began to network with each other as more and more communities developed programs. In the state of Ohio, for example, the marriage license tax helps to pay for domestic violence programs in each county, which became incentive for each county to develop a program. Shelters networked to serve clients, particularly when a situation became dangerous enough that a client needed to get out of town. But they also began to create statewide organizations and eventually a national organization, the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence. By working together in state and national organizations, domestic violence programs shared information and effective strategies for advocating for their clients with each other.

Within each community, the domestic violence program became a major player in the social service network. Getting into the network was a function of having survived in the community even while marginalized but also through gaining a reputation for being able to change relationships at least in some families. Children’s services workers often recognized that when women were in shelters, there was staff observing family relationships and that was helpful to their planning for potential victims of abuse and neglect.

Over time, relations with law enforcement changed, too. In one town, the police officers and court official began to notice that when the shelter legal advocate worked with a victim, the victim did not drop charges. They began to feel that their efforts in helping families with violence problems would actually lead to something positive instead of just going to the same old houses over and over again. In some communities, police response options began to be studied and it was discovered that when an arrest was made, police were less likely to be called back to the family’s home. This led to mandatory arrest policies in many cities. In order to implement mandatory arrest, police officers had to be trained in understanding the dynamics of domestic violence and this training was part of the change in their responses.

Another area where change is really evident is the church. During the 1960s it was not uncommon for women to be encouraged by the church to stay in violent relationships because “God hates divorce.” Over time, ministers and church people have gotten involved with domestic violence programs as volunteers and donors and have learned about what it is really like in a violent family. Now, many ministers and pastors advise victims to get out of violent relationships. Nowadays, shelters are a mainstream social service agency, along with alcohol and drug treatment programs, children’s services, and many other social services in a typical community.

Domestic violence programs may offer a wide range of services, from shelter to community-based support groups, long term housing, legal advocacy, advocacy in other areas of life, and even programs for the abusers. While average citizens may not know much about domestic violence programs in their community, they probably know that these programs exist—domestic violence programs and their values have become part of Americans’ consciousness.

Domestic violence programs have also become better funded and often they have moved from old rickety houses to spacious and professional-looking quarters, sometimes to buildings that were specifically designed to be shelters. In the past forty years we have moved from racist laws to having an African American President. But progress in Civil Rights has not been our only achievement. America’s response to domestic violence has moved from non-existent to very effective and helpful. While there are many social issues that remain a problem for our culture, our children at least know that both racism and family violence are wrong.

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Criminal investigation has a long history, both formally and informally. As long as there has been gossip, there have been people who have investigated whatever allegations a cave person might have against another cave person: that guy stole my mastodon bone! Eavesdropping is as old as spoken language and it is probable that since the dawn of time some folks hid in the bushes to keep an eye on what other folks were doing. On a more formal level, investigative services arose as an alternative to policing, which did not make official law enforcement very happy at first.

In fact, the first private detective, Eugène François Vidocq, was arrested for his work. He got out on appeal. Sherlock Holmes, as a character, was created while private detective work, as a profession, was rising in popularity. Holmes’s main strategy for solving a crime was a powerful sense of logic; he could look at a series of clues and figure out a chain of events from that. Real detective work, though, competed with police work and thus developed technologies that are familiar to anyone who watches crime shows on television: ballistics, plaster shoe tracks, and even bond paper that was more difficult to be forged. All of these were created by Vidocq. Private businesses began noticing the advantage of hiring a private investigation agency. If law enforcement couldn’t catch Jesse James and his gang, then maybe the Pinkertons could.

Even today, companies hire private eyes to keep employees from stealing secrets and selling them to competitors. Preventing loss via shoplifting has become a major part of the investigative services industry currently. While police officers are legally in charge of investigating a crime scene, even Sherlock Holmes did not rely simply on the word of others about the clues. He observed the crime scene himself. Private investigators look at clues from crime scenes, especially if there might be a civil court case connected to the crime or when citizens feel a crime should be investigated more thoroughly than the police can do in a given case.

A person who is accused of a crime may hire a private detective to find evidence of someone else’s guilt. There is an art to reading the clues at a crime scene—of knowing what is a real clue and what might have been staged, being able to figure out how marks such as blood splatters or tire tracks might have been made, being able to spot the tiniest detail that is out of place and potentially a great source of information.

There is also an art to questioning people, to see the little flick of the eye that might indicate prevarication, to keep track of details to see if there is consistency across all witnesses. The need for the power of observation has not changed since the days of Sherlock Holmes. What has changed, and this is what would be very different for old Sherlock, is technology. The World Wide Web has added a new moniker to the old PI—“web detective.” The web provides a vast array of information that can assist a private eye in an investigation. For example, one can find property records, business filings, court records, property tax records, not to mention what people put on the web about themselves in social networking sites.

Instead of having to go to the county court house for dusty records in obscure boxes or run through miles of microfilm in a library, this information is a search and a few clicks away. Information searches these days are a lot more detailed than they used to be and they take far less time.

Forensic computing and forensic accounting have arisen as specialties in private investigation agencies as a result of technology. While embezzlement has taken place for as long as there has been any form of exchange of goods or money between human beings, modern embezzlement has become complex with the electronic network of banks and business. Embezzlers, of course, do their best to wipe their hard disks of evidence, but a good private eye with some hacking skills can find the smoking gun, even if it is in binary.

Computers have escalated the crime of identity theft, which has become as every day as the common cold. Here is where a private detective can really help a victim to figure out who is stealing the information and to track the chain of crimes that have been committed. Private eyes can also follow the money and help to break up crime rings that make use of false identities. Another change that would shock Sherlock is the global nature of business and relationships and therefore detective agency work. Drugs, money, goods, even people are smuggled from here to there, to avoid some law or other. Federal agents at the border can only do so much. Private detectives even work for environmental non-profit organizations to prevent the smuggling of endangered species across various national borders.

The material items a detective is working with have changed drastically since the time of Sherlock Holmes. We can do DNA tests, fingerprint identification, and use technology in so many other ways to figure out who is doing what to whom—to find and examine evidence. We can watch people with infrared heat sensing devices or even look up a picture of their neighborhood on a satellite.

The people haven’t changed. They are still cheating on each other, still tucking merchandise in their coats, still pocketing the cash, still faking the books, still running off with the kids in a custody battle, still bootlegging or selling drugs, still killing, still forging money and other documents, still trying to get you to wire them $300 so you can get the inheritance from Nigeria. And all the people affected by these activities still require the services of a private detective agency. What also has not changed about being a private detective is what Sherlock and our modern PI’s share: an ability to find the pieces and put puzzles together. This requires stick-to-itiveness and creativity. People who want to hide their activities have the motivation to explore new ways of doing so.

Investigative services continue to advance the technology of finding information in ways that Sherlock Holmes could not have predicted (although his brother Mycroft would have been a phenomenal hacker), but would nevertheless have approved.

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