Ashley just had a baby. She’s sitting on the couch in a relative’s apartment in Clarksdale, Mississippi, wearing camo-print leggings and fiddling with the plastic hospital bracelets still on her wrists. It’s pushing 32°C, which means the brown patterned curtains are drawn, the air conditioner is on high and the room feels like a hiding place. Peanut, the baby boy she delivered two days earlier, is asleep in a car seat at her feet, dressed in a little blue outfit. Ashley is surrounded by family, but nobody is smiling. One relative silently eats lunch in the kitchen, her two siblings stare glumly at their phones and her mother, Regina*, watches from across the room. Ashley* was discharged from hospital only hours ago, but there are no baby presents or toys in the room. Almost nobody knows that Peanut* exists, because almost nobody knew that Ashley was pregnant. She is 13 years old.
In 2022, Ashley was raped by a stranger in the yard outside her home, her mother says. For weeks, she didn’t tell anybody what happened, not even her mum. But Regina knew something was wrong. Ashley used to love going outside to make dances for her TikTok, but suddenly she refused to leave her bedroom. When she turned 13 that November, she wasn’t in the mood to celebrate. “She just said, ‘It hurts,’” Regina remembers. “She was crying in her room. I asked her what was wrong, and she said she didn’t want
