Alecia Faith Pennington (Faith) did not officially exist until she was nineteen. Faith’s conservative, religious parents, Lisa and James, raised their nine children on the family farm just outside Kerrville, Texas, and kept their family as self-sufficient and separate from the rest of the world as possible. The family was very insular; the parents homeschooled all of the children, and the family rarely left their home, with the rare exception of going to church. Lisa and James also prohibited their children from using the Internet until they were eighteen, at which point they were only allowed limited access to websites their parents deemed safe and appropriate. According to Faith, her parents created this closed-off world for their children because they wanted to keep “sinful” things away from their kids. The children were not allowed to argue with their parents, and they grew up dutifully obeying this rule. Faith, the fourth-born child, describes herself as more “stubborn” and “free-spirited” than her siblings. When she was eighteen, she decided she and her siblings had “no future” and that she needed to get away. She used her WiFi-compatible iPod to text her grandparents and ask them to take her home with them the next time they came to visit the farm. A week later, Faith became the first Pennington child to disobey her parents and leave home. Faith said she found the strength to leave because she “knew it was the right thing to do” and because she needed to take control of her own life.