Creating a Youth Sex Trafficking Prevention Curriculum Using CBPAR: Challenges, Successes, and Lessons Learned

Project LIVE (Love, Inclusivity, Values, and Education) is a five-year Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) funded project designed to evaluate the effectiveness of a school-based curriculum aimed at preventing the sexual exploitation of children (SEC) utilizing community-based participatory action research (CBPAR) methods. This paper describes challenges, successes, and lessons learned throughout the first two years of the project (Phase I), encompassing the open pilot trial. Framed by ecological systems theory (EST);, primary challenges at the microsystem (e.g. fictitious people trying to enroll in the study, difficulty matching anonymous surveys across time), mesosystem (e.g. misalignment across microsystems, differences in cultural and lived experience background between student participants and the research team, student resistance to participation), exosystem (e.g. personnel turnover), and macrosystem (e.g. state law changes requiring active guardian consent) are delineated. Active participation among research advisory board members, protocol adaptability, and collaboration and support across microsystems constitute major successes from Phase I.