Childhood friends Iris, Mary and Sarah were once typical teenage girls – they did homework together, took selfies, and wandered along the unpaved roads of their village, Long Menapa, in the Malaysian state of Sarawak.

Their village is a three-hour drive from the nearest secondary school, and seven hours from the nearest town.

Iris, the eldest of the girls, is 16. Mary and Sarah are 14. Each of them enjoyed school and look back on their time in education fondly. But it has been two years since any of them attended class. They stopped going when they got married.

Now they live in their husbands’ longhouses, a traditional form of elongated and narrow housing raised on stilts used by many native communities in Sarawak.

Malaysian children as young as 12 are getting married, and it’s legal – South China Morning Post