South Korea's Truth Commission has called on the country to apologise to those sent abroad “as luggage” so adoption agencies could make a profit.
South Korea on Wednesday acknowledged for the first time that in the rush to send children to American and European families decades ago, its adoption agencies engaged in widespread abuses, including falsifying documents to make children more adoptable.
The findings by South Korea’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, a government agency that said children were sent “like baggage” for profit decades ago, are a hard-won victory for South Korean adoptees abroad. Many have returned to their home country in recent years, tirelessly campaigning for South Korea to come to terms with one of the most shameful legacies of its modern history.
The commission found that adoption agencies had falsified documents to pass off children as orphans when they had known parents. When some children died before being sent abroad, others were sent in their names. The heads of four private adoption agencies were given the right to become legal guardians of children by placing them for adoption abroad.
The commission's report was the government's first official acknowledgement of problems with the country's adoption practices, including a lack of oversight, though such abuses have been uncovered in the past. The agency recommended that the state apologize for violating the rights of South Korean adopted children.
South Korea is the source of the world's largest diaspora of children adopted from abroad: since the end of the Korean War in 1953, about 200,000 South Korean children have been sent abroad, mostly to the United States and Europe.
In its impoverished postwar decades, South Korea promoted overseas adoptions to find homes for orphaned, abandoned, or disabled children abroad, rather than creating a welfare system for them at home. The government empowered adoption agencies to find and send children abroad for a fee from adoptive families.
