Grant: Travel Awards - Institute Community Support

Background: Recently, arts-based approaches, including the use of filmmaking, drama, hip hop, graffiti, photography, and other visual arts, and culturally-grounded art forms, have been identified as engaging, empowering, holistic, and successful strategies for STBBI prevention with a variety of populations in Canada, including Indigenous youth and youth from ACB communities. Arts-based STBBI prevention programming is compatible with many best practices for STBBI interventions targeting diverse youth, including youth-led peer education strategies and strategies that address structural/systemic factors including the impact of colonialism, racism, homophobia and transphobia. While one of the strengths of arts-based HIV/STBBI prevention approaches is that they are often highly context specific and tailored to the communities in which they are implemented, the highly contextual nature of arts-based interventions can pose challenges for scaling or implementing interventions in new contexts, as well as the creation of community-oriented implementation guidance/guidelines. The objective of this study is to assess what is known within peer-reviewed literature about the use of the arts for HIV/STBBI prevention with youth in Canada, USA, New Zealand, Australia, and the United Kingdom. Methods: A scoping review was conducted using the JBI Scoping Review protocol. A search was conducted in 4 databases to identify relevant literature. Title and abstracts and full text reviews were conducted by two independent researchers. Data relevant to our guiding question(s) will be abstracted, analyzed, and summarized. Discussion: This scoping study will be the first study to systematically examine what is known about the use of the arts in HIV/STBBI prevention for youth. We anticipate that our findings will inform the development of future HIV/STBBI prevention programming, as well as the creation of community friendly arts-based programming implementation guidelines.