A Citizen Science Approach to Increase HIV/STI/HCV Testing and Substance Use Service Utilization Among Survivors of Sex Trafficking Living in New York City

This project will assess whether a digital survivor crowdsourced intervention can increase HIV/STI/HCV testing and overdose prevention kit utilization among survivors of sex trafficking living in New York City. Survivors of sex trafficking have among the highest rates of HIV/STIs/HCV and substance use disorder (SUD), yet they face substantial barriers to care, including lack of information about care and financial and logistical constraints. In addition, there is a lack of public health messaging tailored specifically for survivors of sex trafficking to meet their needs. Citizen science approaches, such as crowdsourcing (i.e., engaging groups of individuals to address public health challenges and share solutions), are scalable, cost-effective tools that can increase HIV/SUD prevention and treatment utilization. Crowdsourcing can be used to engage survivors in developing tailored messaging to promote HIV/STI/HCV testing, overdose prevention, and treatment utilization. Complementing crowdsourcing, specimen self-collection with remote HIV/STI/HCV testing and online delivery of overdose prevention kits to survivors may also increase use of needed healthcare services. Study aims are: 1) develop crowdsourced digital messages to promote HIV/STI/HCV testing uptake and utilization of overdose prevention services for substance use among sex trafficking survivors; 2) in a randomized controlled trial, to compare the survivor-crowdsourced HIV and substance use intervention to existing public health messaging among sex trafficking survivors (n=368) in New York City; and 3) assess the contribution of multi-level factors on reach, effectiveness, adoption, implementation, and maintenance (RE-AIM) outcomes. This work will result in a digital crowdsourced intervention to increase HIV/STI/HCV testing uptake, overdose prevention kit utilization, and linkage to care among survivors of sex trafficking. This project will also result in a crowdsourcing and messaging toolkit that can be broadly distributed to public health and other agencies across the country for their use in designing messaging campaigns for survivors. Findings from this project will lay the groundwork for citizen science-developed HIV and SUD interventions for sex trafficking survivors across the US.