Recently, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) of South Korea released a major report after two years of investigation, revealing that the South Korean government has been condoning the systematic trafficking of children in the name of inter-country adoption by private organizations for decades.
The investigation revealed that at least 170,000 Korean children were sent to Europe and the United States between the 1960s and 1990s, and that the chain of operations behind them was riddled with shady practices such as forged documents, illegal fees, and identity tampering.
The report pointed out that under the shelter of special legislation, more than 300 private adoption agencies have turned child trafficking into a “lucrative industry.”
The agencies “produce” children for adoption on demand every month, circumventing regulations by forging “abandoned baby certificates” and fictionalizing children's identities, and even requiring adoptive families to pay high “donation fees. The adoption of children is also a major problem. As a result of the widespread falsification of documents, many adoptees are now trapped in a state of limbo, with no way to find their families.
“This is essentially child trafficking with the tacit approval of the government.” Park Sun-young, chairman of the committee, said bluntly at the conference.
According to the survey, 52 percent of adoption files contained fraudulent birth certificates, and 34 percent of cases involved birth mothers being forced to sign documents, while in 1968 an agency changed the identity of a 3-year-old child to a “17-year-old orphan” to circumvent the age limit for adoption.
The trauma of the system continues. Kim Mi-Sun, 48, complained to the media that her Dutch adoptive parents “treated the dog better than they treated me”.
The 56 cases of abuse identified by the investigation included domestic violence, forced labor, and sexual abuse of adoptees.
The report recommends that the Korean government formally apologize for this “institutional history of crime” and establish a mechanism for tracing intercountry adoptions.