More than 1,030 Ohio juveniles were the victims of human trafficking between 2014 and 2016, a new study by the University of Cincinnati shows.

Another 4,209 youths were at risk of being trafficking victims, the study paid for with a grant from the Ohio Department of Public Safety shows.

The estimates were released just after The Enquirer reported its year-long investigation of allegations of sex trafficking and corruption in Portsmouth, the Scioto County seat.

The numbers are "fairly conservative" and that Ohio probably has more trafficking cases than what was found, one of the study's lead authors said in an interview.

"There were a lot of agencies that were unable or unwilling to provide data for privacy and other reasons, so those went unreported," said Valerie Anderson, an assistant professor of criminal justice at UC.

"And there are those who are not reached by the agencies we contacted so those were also left out."

The study also indicated that of those human trafficking victims, 86.8 percent were involved in sex trafficking.

Getting a number of youths subjected to trafficking was crucial because “obtaining reliable data is essential to implementing informed anti-trafficking policy,” said Sophia Papadimos, the state's anti-trafficking coordinator, in a news release. The new estimates "will help guide Ohio’s human trafficking response efforts.”

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But making the estimates wasn't easy. UC's School of Criminal Justice had to comb data from more than a dozen sources to calculate more precise estimates of known juvenile victims and at-risk young adults.

Anderson wouldn't specify which agencies were problematic, but said some problems included spotty record keeping and old technology that made it difficult to extract numbers.

"There wasn't anything that would change the study as a whole, but we probably would have identified more victims with the data," she said.

In addition, there is no way to put the number in context with other states or nationally since other agencies didn't follow the same methodology.

Overall, there were about 2.9 million residents under the age of 19 in 2017, according to the most recent U.S. Census estimates.

The state has a number of initiatives to address sex and labor trafficking, including the creation of a human trafficking awareness campaign, training for all state employees in a regulatory or inspection role and the creation of a human trafficking intelligence component of the Ohio State Highway Patrol 24/7 watch desk.

Ohio also has received federal funding to increase identification of survivors and improve outcomes for child and youth victims of human trafficking.