Almost Gone Twenty-Five Days and One Chance to Save Our Daughter
Baldwin, J. and Baldwin, M. (2017). Almost Gone Twenty-Five Days and One Chance to Save Our Daughter. Howard Books, Brentwood, TN.
I heard about Almost Gone from a friend who had heard about it on Kidd Craddick in the Morning on her way to work. We both work at a high school and are exposed daily to kids and their use of social media. The impact social media has on these kids lives is profound-- so profound that they don't even notice when it takes over every aspect of their every waking moment. Almost Gone is a book about that very thing, written by the people that it happened to.
Almost Gone is written by Mackenzie Baldwin and her dad, John, and chronicles their journey through a very dark and frightening period in their lives that threatened to tear their family apart. Mackenzie met and fell in love with "Aadam" on a random match site called Omegle, began following him on Facebook, and went on to Skype and Facetime over the course of 14 months. What began as a very innocent chat between two complete strangers thousands of miles apart developed into a very serious, controlling emotional and mental relationship that very nearly destroyed Mackenzie and her family. Over time, Aadam was able to worm his way into every single aspect of Mackenzie's life to the point that she abandoned the Christian faith that she was raised in and turned her back on her entire way of life. She gave up any involvement in her senior year and devoted her every waking minute to saving and planning for the day she would travel across the world to the very dangerous Kosovo, a region known for its sex slavery, kidnapping, and organized crime, to meet and marry Aadam. In an all-out effort to prevent her from going and break Aadam's hold on Mackenzie, her parents dove head-first with FBI agents into what would be the most stressful, secretive, and tentative endeavor of their lives. As a warning to others, the Baldwins detailed every aspect of their journey through the worst experience of their lives in Almost Gone.
Even though many of us, as adults, are well aware of the dangers of social media and its ability the shrink our world down to a screen and a keyboard, I think often we underestimate the power of mental and emotional control others have over our kids in spite of physical distance and in spite of our diligence in monitoring our kids. We fool ourselves into thinking that if we are careful and involved in our kids' activity on social media that they will be "safe" but this book is a very real example of just how mistaken that way of thinking can be.
