 What makes for excellence in heart care? It starts with one of the most amazing teams of heart surgeons and cardiologists that I've seen assembled under one roof and the region's leading technology in a new $40 million facility. This is the nationally recognized Heart and Vascular Institute of Eastern Kentucky at Pikeville Medical Center. A team of researchers at the University of Kentucky are studying strategies to prevent child sex trafficking across the state of Kentucky. According to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services in 2021, Kentucky had the nation's highest child abuse and neglect rate for the third consecutive year. Having that ability to traffic an individual sometimes in either setting is what keeps that situation essentially occurring in check, meaning not with law enforcement and notification, is keeping it quiet. A lot of what we're doing with our Bicenter intervention is really helping to identify and to reduce the stigma around child sex trafficking. And that's true for middle school staff, that's the focus of our intervention, but really for all of us because the idea of Bicenter interventions that help keep all of us safe. No one deserves to be trafficked, abused, you describe violence, no one deserves to have violence, but with the Bicenter intervention we can really focus on keeping each other safe and learning how to do that in a way that is effective. The first phase of the research involves a billboard campaign in more than two dozen randomized counties across Kentucky. So CSTOP now we worked a lot on coming up with our logo and it's really the child sex trafficking and concurrent to that stop. So remove the C, you have stopped and we want to do that now. So that's where the letters to our intervention come from. But the idea then is that when we know how to see it, we can stop it, which is the words behind the billboard. And that's a lot of what we're doing with our mass media campaign and to use an individual who is who is more androgynous because this child sex trafficking can happen essentially to any child. So what we're trying to do is to bring people making increasingly awareness and then also bringing the individual to our website. And we have strategies around preventing child sex trafficking there. And you can find out more information, more information about the study as well. And other links to resources within the state of Kentucky and nationally. Researchers are now asking any Kentuckians who see one of the billboards to visit CSTOPnow.com to find more information about the risks, warning signs and resources for reporting child sex trafficking. Reporting for Mountain Top News, I'm Brianna Robinson.