Her boyfriend was told he’d be excommunicated from his church over the relationship, and obtaining parental consent to an underage marriage was “easy," Clark says, so she was wedded a few weeks after her 17th birthday.
“If we had been forced to wait,” Clark says, “maybe I would have seen the truth before going forward.”
Her marriage turned abusive to the point that Clark says she nearly lost her life after being raped and strangled. She shared her story Monday during a hearing of the House Judiciary Committee of the Utah Legislature. Her testimony was by way of asking lawmakers to support a bill, HB234, that would ban all underage marriages in the state.