Editor’s Note: The names of the children and adults subjected to computer solicitation have been changed to protect them.

Linda Smith of Houlton couldn’t sleep one night in April, so she got up, went to the kitchen to get something to drink, then decided to go to her computer to surf the Internet for a while.

When she logged on, she noticed the message indicator for her 13-year-old daughter’s instant message service was blinking.

“I thought, ‘Who would be trying to get a hold of my daughter at 2 in the morning on a school night?”‘ Smith recalled recently.

When the indicator still blinked after 20 minutes, she clicked on for a message. She received no response, other than the contact’s nickname, so she decided to check her daughter’s message history file for that nickname. The file is an electronic copy of any online conversations the girl had.

“After I started reading that, I just freaked out,” Smith recalled of the April 1 incident.

The message sender, apparently an older man, had suggested to her young teen that she strip for him or that they could sneak off and make out somewhere.

“I’m a stay-at-home mom, and I couldn’t believe that this could happen,” Smith said.

In fact, it happens all too frequently, according to an investigator with the Maine Computer Crimes Unit in Vassalboro. The incident involving Smith’s daughter was one of two that have occurred this spring in Aroostook County, and the number of incidents in Maine seems to be increasing.

The frightening part is that many kids don’t tell their parents they are solicited for sex, according to Sgt. Glenn Lang of the computer crimes unit.

“There are more kids with access to the Internet, and more adults are realizing they can reach out to kids and be semianonymous,” Lang said. “These kids can be so easily duped.”

The number of cases of online solicitation is “staggeringly underreported,” Lang said. “So many go unreported, and the parents never do find out about it.”

That’s almost what happened with Smith’s daughter Joanne. What started out as a general conversation between the girl and her adult contact about sports, music and friends soon turned into a suggestion that they sneak off together.

On three occasions the girl had told the man she was just 13 years old, and once she told him she was only in seventh grade.

“He told me once that he was older, but I just thought we were going to be talking on the Internet,” the girl said. “He kept asking me really personal questions that made me really uncomfortable.”

Joanne finally agreed to a meeting – “I was just trying to be cool,” she said – but later made up excuses why she couldn’t go through with it.

She also was afraid to tell her parents because she had broken their rule about having online conversations only with people she knew.

The man asked the girl to keep the meeting a secret, asking her to “promise not to say a word to anyone” and “don’t go tellin’ a soul.”

Linda Smith immediately woke up her daughter to find out what was going on, and the mother and her husband, John Smith, reported the incident to police later that morning.

After an investigation, Jerrod White, 23, of Houlton was issued a summons charging him with solicitation of a child by computer to commit a prohibited act, according to Houlton Police Chief Daniel Soucy.

White is scheduled to make his initial court appearance July 14 in 2nd District Court in Houlton.

The chat sessions between Joanne and White began on March 25 and continued until they were discovered by her mother on April 1. During those chat sessions, White said he was joking and repeated that claim again when contacted online by Linda Smith and the local police.

“If it was such a joke, why did he describe his car, every sticker on his car, where he was going to park, what time he wanted to meet at, what time he was going to get me back at?” Joanne asked, speaking about the incident.

“He described everything so much it wasn’t even funny, that it couldn’t have been a joke.”

Barbara Jones’ 13-year-old daughter was contacted in late March by an older man who wanted to know whether the teenager wanted “a discreet f- buddy,” Jones of Caribou said during a recent telephone interview.

“She added his profile to her contacts list just to see who he was,” Jones said of her daughter, who also told her about the contact.

“We figured it was just a joke, so we basically just ignored it,” Jones said.

Two days later, the man contacted her again.

“He came right out and asked her if she was interested in losing her virginity,” Jones said.

Police were called and a plan was developed to have Jones pose as her daughter on the Internet. During the next contact, police were on hand to coach the mother about how to respond.

“He was very explicit about what he wanted to do,” Jones said of the man, adding that the online conversation was difficult for her.

“I tried to think like a 13-year-old, but I’m also her mother,” she said.

A sting was set up with a female Caribou police officer posing as the teenager for a meeting. The computer contact was asked to meet during the afternoon of April 11 on a street in Caribou.

Joel Clark, 46, of Washburn subsequently was arrested and charged with attempted gross sexual assault, dissemination of sexually explicit material, and solicitation of a child by computer to commit a prohibited act.

On May 8, he was indicted by the Aroostook County grand jury for attempted gross sexual assault and soliciting a child by computer. He remains in Aroostook County Jail in Houlton on $5,000 cash bail or $50,000 double surety.

When the Maine Computer Crimes Unit was formed in 1999, Lang and other officers went online posing as children to see whether such activity was a problem in Maine.

“Within hours, we were getting approached left and right,” he said during a recent telephone interview.

The online offers included wanting to know where the fictitious children lived, requests for photos, and suggestions that they meet in person.

Last year, the computer crimes unit investigated 12 solicitation cases for police departments in Maine. So far this year, the unit has investigated seven.

“It’s the kind of thing that kids tend to keep to themselves,” Neale Adams, Aroostook County district attorney, said of the solicitations. “It’s only rarely that it will surface.”

Adams, who said he sees few cases, said he thinks computer solicitation is happening more often, but kids first try to handle the situations themselves, never telling their parents.

The Crimes Against Children Research Center at the University of New Hampshire studied the problem. After conducting more than 1,500 interviews with children ages 10 to 17, the center found that:

. One in five received a sexual approach or solicitation over the Internet during the past year.

. One in 33 received an aggressive sexual solicitation, meaning the young person was asked to meet the predator, was called on the phone by the predator or received letters, money or gifts through the mail from the predator.

. One in four had an unwanted online exposure to naked people or people having sex.

. One in 17 was threatened or harassed.

The study revealed that only about 25 percent of the youngsters told a parent and only a fraction of all episodes were reported to authorities.

According to Lang, the experiences of the two Aroostook County girls are typical, since both were contacted through chat rooms on the Internet.

While some information on chat room profiles is supplied by people who use them, other information can be gleaned from what otherwise might be considered innocent conversation.

“People can be cluing in on who they are and where they are just by the questions they ask, without [the victims] thinking they’ve released the slightest bit of information,” Lang said.

Simple conversations about weather or a school name can help a contact narrow down where a victim might live, he pointed out.

The best protection from such intrusions is for parents to become more computer-savvy and to find out what their children do when on the Internet, the investigator said.

“Every parent who allows their children on the Internet ought to be running some monitoring software,” he said.

For the Smith and Jones families, the incidents have been unsettling.

“I couldn’t believe that this guy could invade my house with a computer and try to lure my daughter out in the middle of the night,” Linda Smith said.

“Parents have really got to do their homework on these things,” John Smith said. “They’ve got to be nosy.”

Linda and John Smith have begun monitoring Joanne’s computer time even more and making sure that chat histories are being kept for them to review.

If the parents find even one history erased, which can be determined on the computer, “we’ll assume that that action means she’s done something wrong,” John Smith said.

Barbara Jones, too, has gained new insight into the world of Internet solicitation. Even though her daughter reported the solicitation to her, Jones said, she now is in the room or nearby whenever her daughter is online.

“We never thought it was going to go like this,” she said.

She’s glad her daughter came to her right away, but the situation has made her wonder, too.

“What if it had been some other girl and she hadn’t told anyone and she went along with this man?” she asked. “What could have happened?”