SEOUL — A message on the website of a South Korean agency famed for putting Korean children up for adoption by American families for more than 60 years comes as a shock after reports of widespread abuses of “fundamental human rights of adoptees.”
“Intake for the Korea program is currently closed,” the note in small red lettering says. It’s below an upbeat introductory paragraph proclaiming, “Holt established the first international adoption program in South Korea.” The agency’s “Korea adoption program,” the note says, “is not accepting standard process applications.”
That flat assertion offers no reason for the abrupt halt in Holt’s Korean program, but comes after disclosures by human rights investigators and journalists of repeated violations by South Korean organizations responsible for sending approximately 200,000 babies and small children to prospective parents around the world beginning after the Korean War ended in a highly armed armistice in 1953. The wave of adoptions, initiated while South Korea existed in near-poverty for the first decade after the war, crested during the long era of quasi-military dictatorship under the late Park Chung-hee, who seized power in 1961, and his successor, Chun Doo-hwan, who took over after Park’s assassination in 1979 and ruled until 1988.
The latest, most detailed analysis, conducted by the government-funded but private “Truth and Reconciliation Commission of the Republic of Korea,” holds the Korean government primarily to blame for having “violated the fundamental human rights of adoptees by sending numerous children overseas without proper legislative frameworks, oversight, or adherence to administrative procedures.” This “failure,” it says, “resulted in the infringement of adoptees’ rights” as protected by Korea’s constitution, created in 1987 after widespread demonstrations against dictatorial rule.
The report, issued this week in a preliminary summary of a voluminous final version due two months from now, accuses both government bureaucracy and private agencies of errors in judgement and falsification of records based on a petition by 367 adoptees sent to 11 countries over a 35-year period between 1964 and 1999. The majority of cases, 227, were from one country, Denmark, according to a commission investigator, Jung Da-un, largely because they had banded together in a single group. Another 45 were from America and 22 from Sweden. So far, scrutinizing 100 cases in detail, the commission has verified abuses in 56 cases.
Those numbers barely scratch the surface of the stories of thousands of adoptees who have visited Korea in recent years on missions to discover who they really are and the identities of their parents.
Since DNA came into widespread use about 25 years ago in quests for blood relationships, “Many who have searched for their roots discovered that their adoption paperwork was inaccurate or fabricated,” according to the Associated Press, reporting on its own investigation conducted with PBS’s “Frontline.” “Western governments turned a blind eye to rampant fraud and sometimes pressured the South Korean government to keep the kids coming. Now many adoptees believe they were stolen.”
In one case documented by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, after “the biological mother signed an adoption consent form” and “entrusted the child to Holt,” the agency “took custody of the child after conducting only a single interview with the birth mother, without obtaining any documentation verifying her identity or biological relationship to the child.”
In another case, “A daycare director, who was merely an acquaintance of the child’s maternal grandmother, volunteered as the guardian and requested adoption through Korean Social Services the day after the child’s birth,” but “neither documentation proving the guardian’s identity nor the birth mother’s adoption consent form was submitted.”
The commission offers two basic explanations for what often turned into a racket in which the agencies profited by charging exorbitant fees.
“For nearly 50 years following the Korean War,” it says, “the government prioritized intercountry adoption as a cost-effective alternative to strengthening domestic child welfare policies.” In their zeal to ship the babies overseas, “agencies would substitute another child’s identity to expedite the adoptions” while “adoptive parents were compelled to pay additional ‘donations,’ which were used to secure more children for adoption, effectively turning internal adoption into a profit-driven industry.”