What does it mean to find your roots? For a group of adopted children born in South Korea, what should have been a personal journey to discover their beginnings recently revealed a clandestine, multinational operation spanning several decades.
The South Korean government and Western countries partnered with one another “to supply some 200,000 Korean children to parents overseas, despite years of evidence they were being procured through questionable or downright unscrupulous means,” an investigation spearheaded by The Associated Press recently found.
The extensive investigation, led by AP with PBS News’ “Frontline” contributing, features interviews with more than 80 adoptees from South Korea throughout the United States, Europe and Australia, as well as accounts from parents, adoption agency workers and government officials.
The discoveries: In the dozens of cases, the investigation found that in order to supply adoptees to would-be families, “children were kidnapped off the streets. Parents claim they were told their newborns were dead or very sick, only to have them shipped away,” per AP.
Records were falsified, and the Korea Social Service was found to have admitted to adoptees that their origin stories on their adoption paperwork were entirely invented to get the adoptions through, according to the investigation’s findings. “I would like to apologize for the wrong information in your adoption paper,” a KSS worker wrote to a Danish adoptee in 2016, AP reported. “It was made up just for adoption procedure.”
For adoptees who have looked into their roots, the inaccurate information has led to mistaken reunions, swapped identities and forgotten family histories.
After the Korean War in the 1950s, South Korea’s international adoption system ramped up. Foreign adoptions were a means to an end for the South Korean government and “became a way to reduce social welfare spending and export children it saw as socially undesirable — whether that was biracial babies, children of unmarried mothers or those born to poor families needing support,” according to Frontline.
AP and Frontline’s investigation found evidence of corruption within the country’s adoption agencies. Records from as early as the 1980s, obtained by AP and Frontline, showed that the South Korean government knew about the adoption agencies’ practices, but encouraged them to “facilitate as many adoptions as possible.”
Now, decades later, hundreds of these adoptees have filed cases with the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, Republic of Korea, to determine whether or not their adoptions were mishandled.
South Korean officials declined to answer AP’s questions regarding the country’s past adoption practices, saying only that they will await a fact-finding commission’s conclusion. In a written statement, according to AP, the country’s Health Ministry “acknowledged that skyrocketing adoptions in the 1970s-80s were possibly driven by an intent to reduce welfare spending.”