South Korea’s international adoption program under fire

MARY REICHARD, HOST: Coming up next on The World and Everything in It:

Holding South Korea accountable.

There’s a new report from South Korea’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission. It says the government played a direct role in violating the rights of children in the country’s foreign adoption program.

NICK EICHER, HOST: WORLD’s Lindsay Mast reports on what the commission found, including disturbing details about practices that went on for decades.

ROBYN JOY PARK: It really kind of flipped my world upside down and had me really questioning … “Well, who am I then?”

LINDSAY MAST: When Robyn Joy Park moved from America back to South Korea after college, she wanted to know more about her heritage. She was born there, then adopted in 1982. An adoption agency found the birth mother on Park’s paperwork. They grew close.

Audio from a documentary produced by Frontline PBS.

PARK: The relationship with her developed over time. It was about, like six years.

She wanted to know more about her father, so she did some DNA testing.

PARK: I learned that this was not my biological mother. Initially it was kind of denial, no this can’t be true. All this paperwork shows otherwise.

Park was left to wonder what had happened. Later, she would learn she wasn’t the only Korean adoptee with questions.

AUDIO: Park Sun Young, chairperson of Truth and Reconciliation Commission

Last week, the South Korea Truth and Reconciliation Commission released findings from a two-year-plus investigation into its international adoption program, placing children from Korea in other countries. The commission found human rights violations including fraudulent orphan registrations, child identity tampering, and the inadequate vetting of adoptive parents.

Historian Paul Cha is a senior lecturer at Hong Kong University specializing in modern Korean History.

PAUL CHA: There was a confluence of forces that led to South Korea coming to be this very pivotal place and location where international adoption suddenly became big business.

Korea’s intercountry adoptions grew rapidly in the 1950s, following the U.S. occupation of the peninsula and the Korean War. The country was shattered. Many children had been orphaned or separated from their families.

From the 1950s to 1990s, more than 140,000 Korean children were adopted internationally. Early on, many were the mixed-race children of Western soldiers and Korean women. Those children would have been at risk in a homogenous culture that wouldn’t have accepted them.

CHA: So there's demand in the US, for babies, for adoptions, there is supply in Korea caused by the Korean War. And then there's also the Cold War context, and religion, in particular, Christianity.

As the country worked to overcome the effects of the war, Cha says Christian aid agencies spread the word that children in South Korea were in danger. And people in the west—many of them Christians—were eager to help.

The commission says the Korean government saw intercountry adoption as a cost-effective way to strengthen the country’s child welfare system. But some adoption practices it allowed violated the rights of both the children and their birth parents.

CHA: At least half, if not more of the children who are at these orphanages are not orphans. So if you're not careful, right, you are sending abroad children who are not orphans. They're not abandoned in the true sense of the word. And so in a rush to do something, in a rush to act, they didn't take proper care and time, and children got hurt as a result of that.

The report says in giving adoption agencies authority over the process, it left little oversight to regulate their conduct. That left Korean children vulnerable.

AUDIO: Park Sun Young, chairperson of Truth and Reconciliation Commission

The chair of the commission says 367 adoptees from 11 countries filed petitions requesting the investigation. Its findings are dark.

The report documents babies who were taken from biological parents who hadn’t given proper consent, as well as deliberate neglect by adoption agencies in finding the parents of abandoned children.

There were cursory processes for approving adoptive parents. Thousands of approvals processed in just one day.

The commission also found forced donations to adoption agencies … and discussions about just how many babies the agencies could make available each month.

A black and white photo in the report shows rows of children on a plane headed to Denmark. The infants lay swaddled in their blankies, held in place with seatbelts.

CAMERON LEE SMALL: There was deception involved. This is disturbing information.

Cam Lee Small is a licensed professional clinical counselor in Minnesota. He specializes in helping adoptees work through adoption grief and trauma.

He was also adopted from Korea in the 1980s. He has memories of his mother and father, before his father died. He is not part of the investigation, but it hits close to home.

SMALL: For adoptees who are my age, or just people who were adopted back then, and now, we're wondering, okay, well, what was I rescued? Was I trafficked? Was my information falsified? Did my mom want me or not, like, which one is it? I was told she loved me so much she gave me away. Now I'm finding out that some mothers were coerced or lied to.

He was reunited with his mother as an adult. But grappling with his identity drove him to help other adoptees do the same. He says it can be especially hard for cases where a person’s origins aren’t clear.

SMALL: So in that sense of betrayal trauma, the literature, uh, talks about the loss of trust in authority figures, the loss of continuity. Is my story true? Where am I from? Who am I from? Why was I placed for adoption? Why have I had to live with these questions and sadness and different, uh, conflicts and tension throughout my life?

So far, the commission has found more than 50 of the cases showed human rights violations. It plans to investigate the remaining cases by May. It recommends the government issue an official apology, and ratify the Hague Convention rules for protecting children in international adoptions.

Meanwhile, the Associated Press reports since 2012, 15,000 adoptees have asked South Korea for help finding family members. Only a fifth have reunited with relatives.

The other 12,000—and perhaps many more—are left wondering about their origins.

Reporting for WORLD, I’m Lindsay Mast.

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