A South Korean commission has uncovered evidence of decades of forced adoptions in the country.
A five-year-long investigation found that government-funded homeless shelters “enslaved” thousands of people, and coerced mothers into giving up their children from the 1960s to the 1980s.
The revelations follow an investigation by global news organisation The Associated Press that exposed a government cover-up of forced foreign adoptions for profit.
Here’s what you need to know.
Background
‘Brothers Home’ was one of South Korea’s biggest ‘welfare centres’ — housing thousands of people in Busan (South Korea’s second-largest city) until it closed in 1988.
The home was meant to be a shelter for homeless and vulnerable members of the community. However, residents were subjected to enslavement, physical and sexual abuse, and murder.
A 2019 investigation by The Associated Press (AP) found women living in the home were pressured into giving their babies up for adoption, as part of a broader money-making scheme.
The AP investigation into Brothers Home uncovered more than 70 children born at the facility between 1979 and 1986 were sent overseas.
The revelations prompted a 2020 inquiry – The South Korean Government’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission – into human rights violations inside the country’s other historic ‘social welfare institutions’.
This month, the commission (TRC) said it had uncovered more evidence of forced adoptions across the country.
Findings
The commission said women in multiple shelters across South Korea were pressured into giving away their children.
Using emigration records and adoption agency registers, the TRC found 1,500 documents showing children were taken from shelters for foreign adoptions.
It said in most cases, hospitals, maternity wards, and adoption agencies would untruthfully declare mothers ‘mentally ill’ or unfit to raise children.
Children were adopted by families across countries including Australia, Denmark, and the United States.
The TRC also found parents were deliberately misled about adoptions.
For example, some were told that their children would be returned to them.
Older children who were taken from their mothers were told they were being rescued from poverty.
It estimates thousands of South Korean babies were adopted overseas between the 1960s and 1980s.
Adoption laws
South Korea overhauled its adoption laws in 2012, as part of efforts to improve adoption processes and reduce foreign and forced adoptions.
The reforms introduced three requirements:
- Parents must wait at least seven days after birth before giving consent to an adoption
- Parents must undergo counselling on alternatives
- Adoptions must be approved by a family court, and recorded in government documents.
Mark Zastrow was adopted from South Korea and grew up in the U.S.
He told CNN the commission findings were an “important milestone.”
“[It] validates what Korean adoptees have known for decades within our community: The narrative that Korean mothers chose of their own volition to relinquish their children is, in all too many cases, a fiction,” he said.
The TRC is continuing its investigations into human rights abuses and forced adoptions.
