South Korea’s government fabricated birth records, falsely reported children had been abandoned and failed to properly conduct safety checks of prospective parents during its postwar frenzy of sending babies overseas for adoption, a long-awaited investigation reported on Wednesday.
Authorities say more than 200,000 South Korean children have been adopted overseas since the 1950s, when the impoverished country was rebuilding from the devastation of World War II and the Korean War – giving rise to a massive and lucrative adoption industry.
Many of those adopted children, now adults scattered across the globe and trying to trace their origins, have accused agencies of coercion and deception, including in some cases forcibly removing them from their mothers.
On Wednesday, the government’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission released its findings on the first 100 cases analyzed out of 367 total petitions filed by adoptees sent overseas between 1964 and 1999.
The adoptees hail from 11 different countries – and many believed their adoptions could have been the result of corruption and malpractice, suspicions that have swirled among the Korean adoptee community for years.
Of those first 100 cases, 56 were identified as “victims” of the government’s negligence, which amounted to a violation of their rights under the Korean constitution and international convention, the commission found.
Part of the problem was that adoptions were almost entirely run by private agencies relying on donations, without government oversight, said Commissioner Lee Sang-hoon at a news conference announcing the findings on Wednesday.
“When adoption agencies depend on donations from adoptive parents, they are pressured to continue sending children abroad to sustain their operations. This structure increases the risk of illegal adoptions,” Lee said.
The commission found evidence of fabricated records, including “deliberate identity substitution” and false reports that the children being adopted had been abandoned by their birth parents. Often there was lack of proper parental consent for adoption, the commission said.
The adoption process was also riddled with problems – including inadequate screening of adoptive parents, neglect from guardians caring for the children, and cases where foreign adoptive parents were pressured to pay to be given a child.
The report gave one example of a woman who signed an adoption consent form the day after giving birth. An adoption agency then took custody of the child after conducting just one interview with the mother, without obtaining any documentation verifying her identity or proving the biological relationship.
The investigation of more than 300 cases began in 2022 and is due to end in May. The latest findings add to a growing list of evidence of deeply rooted, widespread malpractice and coercion in what the commission called a mass exportation of children to meet foreign demand.
It recommended that the government offer an official apology, conduct a comprehensive survey of adoptees’ citizenship status and come up with remedies for victims whose identities were falsified.
“It’s been a long wait for everybody,” said Han Boon-young, who grew up in Denmark and who was one of the 100 adoptees whose cases were heard by the commission. “And so now we do get a victory. It is a victory.”
However, she said she hadn’t been designated a “victim” because of insufficient documentation.
“If they say, we recognize that this is state violence, then how can they not recognize those who don’t have much information? Because that’s really at the core of our issues, that we don’t have information … it’s been falsified, it’s been altered,” she said on Wednesday after the report’s release.
“We’ve had no rights because we don’t have any documents in the first place… This is about human rights – it goes beyond individual cases.”
While adoptions continue today, the trend has been declining since the 2010s after South Korea amended its adoption laws in an effort to address systemic issues and reduce the number of children adopted overseas.