Interventions for socioeconomic inclusion and post-traumatic growth in youth with histories of homelessness and sex trafficking: a scoping review protocol
Amanda Noble, Jennifer Connolly, Kyla McDonald, Yoonhee Lee, Jessica Rogers, Julia Vanderheul, Ashleigh Riley, Kelsey Clancy, Melissa Podner, Holly Zapreff, Raven MannIntroduction
Although often treated as separate social issues, youth homelessness and sex trafficking overlap as homelessness can be both a cause and a consequence of being trafficked. The primary goal of this scoping review is to understand the existing evidence on interventions for youth who have experienced homelessness and/or sex trafficking. We will identify potential differences in intervention design based on gender and Indigeneity and for youth who identify as two-spirited, lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and/or queer.
Methods
We will use the scoping review framework originally developed by Arskey and O’Malley and later refined by Peters et al . Ongoing consultation will mainly occur through a Lived Experience Expert Committee, which consists of eight survivors of youth homelessness and sex trafficking, chaired by two survivors. This review was registered with the Open Science Framework and will follow the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses extension for Scoping Reviews guidelines. We will search for articles published between 2015 and 2026 in MEDLINE (Ovid), PsycINFO (Ovid), Cumulative Index to Nursing and Allied Health Literature (EBSCO), Social Work Abstracts (Ovid) and Applied Social Sciences Index and Abstracts (Proquest). We will include both published and unpublished literature from high-income countries that report on interventions or programmes supporting social, economic or post-traumatic growth for young people aged 16–29 who have experienced homelessness or been involved in the sex industry. Data will be extracted using Covidence software and charted using a piloted data-charting table. Data will be analysed both quantitatively and qualitatively. Frequency counts will be produced for each data extraction category. We will apply basic qualitative content analysis to map the various types of interventions and identify characteristics of the articles, such as data on subpopulations.
Ethics and dissemination
This scoping review does not involve human participants and therefore does not require approval from an institutional ethics board. However, we are dedicated to ongoing reflexivity, authentic partnerships with lived experience experts, fair compensation and efforts to reduce the risk of retraumatisation. The scoping review will inform the development of an intervention for youth who have experienced homelessness and sex trafficking and will be codesigned with lived experts. We will also disseminate our findings in peer-reviewed journals and through conference presentations.