Last month, Pakistan secured the release of American Caitlan Coleman and her husband, Canadian Joshua Boyle, along with their three children. The couple was abducted in 2012 while traveling in Afghanistan and have been held by the Haqqani network, a network with ties to the Taliban, in Pakistan.
The Stewartstown, Pennsylvania, native told ABC News she was beaten and sexually assaulted, sometimes as a result of trying protect her children from their abusive captors.
Coleman said “some of the guards actually actively hated children” and would try to come up with reasons such as he was “being too loud” to beat the eldest, sometimes with a stick.
If she tried to intervene, the guards would turn their attention to her, and the mother sustained substantial injuries.
“She had a broken cheekbone,” Boyle said. “She actually broke her own hand punching one of them. She broke her fingers, so she was very proud of that injury.”
Coleman also accused the guards of a “forced abortion,” suspecting that they put poison in her food that caused her miscarriage of a baby girl.
After she tried to report the crime to the guards’ superiors, she was raped by two men while her child was in the room.
“One day they came into the cell, and they took my husband out forcefully, dragging him out, and one of the guards threw me down on the ground, hitting me and shouting. ‘I will kill you,’ ” she said. “That’s when the assault happened. It was with two men. And then there was a third at the door. And afterwards, the animals wouldn’t even give me back my clothes.”
Coleman, who was already seven months pregnant with her first child when they were initially kidnapped, was able to successfully hide her following two pregnancies from the guards, and the couple did their best to educate their children — her eldest son learned the alphabet, geography and about constellations — and give them makeshift toys.
“We would just teach them to use things like bottle caps or bits of cardboard, garbage essentially, but what we could find to play with,” she said.
They even used British history to make up a game about beheadings in case the situation came to that.
“He certainly knew that this type of thing could happen to his family, so he had great fun pretending to be Oliver Cromwell chasing Charles I around and trying to behead him,” she said. “So we made it a game so that he wasn’t afraid because there was, you know, there was nothing we could do if it came to that except try to make him less afraid.”
Coleman explained that she and her husband “made the decision” to have more children while in captivity, though they declined to explain further.
Boyle said, “I think it’s a sad statement on the state of affairs of the world when a family is asked to justify their decision to have children in any circumstance.”
