Transcribing the First Decade of Children's Videotaped Testimonies in Cyprus: Tourist Season Times

Familiarising researchers and practitioners with different countries' policies for police interviews with children contributes to an exchange of knowledge and strengthens global approaches against child abuse. We start by describing the system of videotaped testimonies in Cyprus during the first 10 years of this system's implementation. We then continue on to the effects of tourism on police interviews with children. Police forces in destinations with high tourist numbers need to comprehend how tourist seasons could influence police interviews with children. No studies investigated whether children of tourists testified in police departments during their holidays. We explored how tourist seasons affected the number of testimonies obtained by Cyprus police forces, taking into account the presence of non-Cypriot and non-native speaking children, the number of testimonies taken in languages other than Greek, and the presence of translators during the interviews. We analysed the national sample of police interviews with children for a period of a decade using official police records and copies of transcripts of children's testimonies. As expected, the results revealed no significant differences in police interviews with children during tourist seasons but show a slight increase in the number of interviews with non-Cypriot children during tourist seasons.