Researchers at the University of Kentucky are hoping to make the state safer for our children.

And a recent study about child sex trafficking, they have identified key challenges they say are limiting progress and prevention.

To move the needle they have implemented at what's called the C stop now, a program aimed at reducing the risk, and also collaborates with researchers across the country.

With the rise of the opioid epidemic, we have seen, more involvement of kids in child sex trafficking that has been perpetrated by their parents and that is caused this increased incident in our state, in more rural areas, in places where you wouldn't expect, if you look at those where the family is family controlled trafficking, the family is the trafficker.

It's younger kids, ages 13 and 14 and sometimes even younger than that.

And so because of that, we really felt like we needed to get to kids younger and we needed to get into schools, which is where can spend the majority of their time.

And so we, randomized schools into either an intervention condition or an intentional control condition condition.

Those in the intervention condition condition got C stop now, and those in the attention control got just a one hour awareness about child sex trafficking.

The difference between the two is in the actual C stop intervention.

We were teaching very specific things you can do to stop child sex trafficking.

We were by we call these bystander actions how to disrupt, to miss, how to decide if it's happening, how to delegate to other professionals to come in and do further, assessment.

When we got researchers together and we shared our experience, I think in the multi-site consortium, we identified several gaps in the research in general, the prevalence of child sex trafficking is very difficult to estimate.

The reason is, is, we often say that these victims are hiding in plain sight, that we don't have good estimates of how often it's happening.

Another key thing that we identified as a gap is that, for many issues like, violence against women, or child abuse in general, there is a coordinated federal effort to coordinate all the activities and all of the research in these areas, and to pull data.

And without that, coordinated federal response, it's difficult to allocate dollars towards, child sex trafficking prevention.

It's also very difficult to develop policies and laws that actually respond to what's really happening.

The University of Kentucky is hoping to secure more funding to expand the C Stop Now program to high schools, and the state.