The head of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, Park Sun-young, right, comforts Korean adoptee Yooree Kim during a news conference in Seoul on Wednesday. (Ahn Young-joon/AP)
SEOUL — Boon Young Han remembers growing up in the lush, green countryside of western Denmark in the 1970s and 1980s, where she reconnected to the country she came from when she fell in love with taekwondo.
Adopted at 3 months old by a Danish family, she first became interested in her place of birth — South Korea — through martial arts, which led her to visit the country in the 1990s and begin studying the language there in the early 2000s.
While in Seoul, she discovered an ugly truth: Many of her fellow adoptees were stolen at birth without their biological parents’ consent, or adopted internationally for profit, often without legally valid documents. Many had their original identities concealed by adoption agencies, and some are still on a quest for their original names and birth families. Numerous children went to homes that were poorly vetted, if at all.
“People need to understand the magnitude of being robbed of your original identity,” Han said. “I was adopted to a good family, but that doesn’t really negate any of my rights to know where I came from, how my life began, what happened to me and what happened to my body for the first few months of my life.”
Han, 50, is one of several adoptees from Denmark who banded together as the Danish Korean Rights Group and successfully campaigned for the South Korean government to launch an investigation into its fraught history with international adoptions, a widely celebrated victory among adoptee activists who for decades campaigned for the government to examine the system’s troubling practices.
On Wednesday, the country’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission released preliminary results of its nearly three-year, ongoing investigation — and for the first time acknowledged that human rights abuses occurred.
“I’m glad to see these long-standing issues finally receiving official recognition,” said Youngeun Koo, an assistant professor at Lund University in Sweden who wrote a book on the history of international adoptions in South Korea. “… However, like many who have worked in this field, I am not surprised by the findings themselves.”
More than 200,000 South Korean children were adopted to families in foreign countries after an armistice halted the Korean War in 1953, according to experts, and the country’s government “failed in its duty” to protect their rights, the commission said in a damning report.
The commission — which is examining more than 360 cases submitted by adoptees from 11 countries — found that some children were taken without their birth parents’ knowledge or consent, and that adoption agency directors at times illegally acted as a guardian to sign off on the adoption. All of the cases involve adoptees sent overseas between 1964 and 1999, and include countries such as the United States, Norway, Sweden, Germany and Canada.
At times, records were falsified to incorrectly state that children were abandoned or orphaned, and their original identities as well as information about their birth families were either “lost, falsified or fabricated,” it said. Agencies sometimes swapped the identity of a child who had died during the adoption process or who was reclaimed by their biological family with that of another child to evade further paperwork, speed up the process and avoid refunding adoption fees, the commission found.
Adoptive families often were not vetted. In 1984 alone, 99 percent of emigration applications for adoptees were approved on the same or the following day, according to the commission. It accused agencies of turning adoptions “into a profit-driven industry,” charging high fees and coordinating with foreign agencies to “send a set number of adoptees each month” in what it called a “mass exportation of children to meet demand.”
“The ways that the children have been procured has been anything but legal, and many have simply closed their eyes,” Han said.
After the Korean War left many in poverty, foreign aid began to pour in, with religious organizations and humanitarian groups establishing orphanages and child welfare programs that allowed the authoritarian regime at the time to show “little interest in building a comprehensive public welfare system,” according to Koo.
By the 1970s, much of that foreign aid had been diverted to other war-torn places such as Vietnam, leaving a vacuum in child welfare funds.
“Rather than increasing public spending or reforming its welfare infrastructure, the government outsourced much of the responsibility to private adoption agencies in South Korea and the Korean social workers working within them,” Koo said. “These agencies were expected to fund domestic welfare services — such as orphanages, reception centers and counseling programs for unwed mothers — through revenue from international adoptions.”
In the end, international adoptions became “not a last resort, but the first and fastest solution,” she said.
Katelyn Hemmeke, a 34-year-old editor of comics and graphic novels, was adopted as an infant and grew up in a “very rural, very White” part of Michigan. She didn’t know that her adoption records were falsified until she was 26 and living in South Korea on a Fulbright research grant. Then she discovered that she was taken without her birth parents’ consent.
“People love to brand us as ‘those angry adoptees.’ But wouldn’t you be angry?” she said. “Wouldn’t you be angry if you were stolen? Angry for yourself — angry for your birth parents?”
“Before I can fully applaud anything, I think it remains to be seen what kind of real action comes out of this,” she said.
Adoptees who have had human rights abuses formally recognized by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission are more likely to be able to pursue some form of legal recourse, Han said. However, the committee so far has only reached a conclusion on a fraction of the cases submitted, and some applicants are being asked to submit further documentation to aid investigators.
“The key issue is that we were never given a legal identity or our legal identity changed, and now suddenly because we don’t have enough documentation, we cannot have human rights violations against us recognized,” Han said.
Most of the records are stored across four different adoption agencies, which have so far resisted activists’ calls to release their full archives. An adoptee’s ability to obtain these records often depends on the individual worker contacted at any given agency, according to Koo.
Human rights abuses were identified in 56 of 100 cases reviewed by the commission so far. The remaining cases have yet to reach a definitive conclusion, according to Han. The inquiry is set to expire in May, and some activists are calling for an extension.
“This reaches far beyond finding mom and dad. We want to restore our true identity,” Han said. “Were you ripped from your mother at birth? Were you stolen while playing outside? That matters to people. That matters for our understanding of self — where and what we came from.”