South Korea Sold Its Children to the World...

When most people think of South Korea today, they think of K-pop and K-dramas. The last thing that ever occurs to anybody is that this was a country that sold its children for money. That’s a bit crude, and not at all how it was marketed, of course, but that’s what it really was. And what makes it so weird is that everybody was part of this, from the government and law enforcement to the international community.

The question becomes, how did something as big as this, with so many victims and perpetrators, fly under the radar for so long?

And when I say big, I’m saying between 170,000 and 200,000 Korean children were sent to adoptive families in the United States, Western Europe, and Australia, making South Korea the longest-running and most prolific source of international adoptees in recorded history.

And while that’s not to say they were all illegally adopted, a boom of this sort should have raised eyebrows. There are many questions that need answers. Did South Korea facilitate adoptions because it wanted only full-blooded Koreans in its country? Were children sent off for adoption even when they had living, caring, capable parents? And what does a slave labor camp in Busan have to do with the international adoption pipeline?

How It All Began

The Korean War, the one that split the country in two, reached a ceasefire in 1953. As anyone can imagine, after a war, the country was devastated. Millions were displaced, the economy was completely shattered, and of course, there was the fact that many were learning to deal with being separated from their loved ones, for who knew how long. But the South Korean government had a vision.

They wanted to rebrand the entire country to look not like what they had just been through, but perfect. And perfect meant modern, advanced, wealthy, and ethically pure.

The first challenge to the kind of country the government wanted to build was children. Think about it for a second. South Korea had just ended a war that had American soldiers on its soil for years. And well, let’s just say these soldiers didn’t just fight.

And because they didn’t just fight, there were a number of South Korean women who had given birth to, or were still pregnant with biracial children. We’re talking about thousands of these children who didn’t exactly fit with South Korea’s definition of “ethically pure.”

President Syngman Rhee, the leader of the government with this weird vision, didn’t come out and say, “Let all biracial children be killed” or whatever it is that we imagine monsters say. Instead, he just passed a bill. And the bill made it very easy for internationals to adopt the children South Korea didn’t want. Essentially, it was like he was saying, “let’s export the children that don’t make the cut for the image we want to build!”

The way the adoptions gained traction was almost as though the stars had aligned somewhere for the South Korean government. Because it started innocently with a farmer from Oregon named Harry Holt.

Holt and his wife, Bertha, had seen photographs of mixed-race Korean children in American publications, and it moved them so much that they traveled to South Korea in 1955, adopted eight children, and brought them home. Somehow, the American press got wind of it, blowing up their adoption journey and bringing them fame. And the story, the face of a Christian charity reaching across the Pacific to save the forgotten children of an ugly war, well, that story captured hearts.

Holt had become a hero, a savior of children, a defender of the weak, the man who was forcing the US to take responsibility for the actions of their soldiers, the man who was giving displaced children a home. And to be fair, Holt was doing something good, at least at the beginning. The US had strict immigration laws that didn’t allow Asians to emigrate to America, and by making the government pass the Holt bill, a bill that allowed him to adopt the eight children he had chosen, he was making history, and not only that, he was making amends for an entire country.

It is no surprise that he became a celebrity of sorts after the adoption was completed. And he was smart; he knew how to feed off the media attention he was receiving, even to the extent of getting the press to witness the arrival of his newly adopted children. And what he did next would set the tone for the international adoption scene in South Korea.

In 1956, Holt built an adoption program he named “Holt International Children’s Services” to meet the surge of demand from American parents who were interested in adopting South Korean children. And when I say surge, I mean he had thousands of requests. And where there’s such intense demand, it becomes a fine line between saving children and running a business.

And when you’re running a business, you want to find the best ways for your “products” to get to your customers. Although I cringe at the thought of children being bundled as products, and maybe that was not Holt’s intention at first, but when you build your adoption model to enable parents to adopt by proxy, a system where they’re able to adopt children without travelling to see them, it is suspicious at best. There’s also the fact that this had been going on since the 1950s, so that meant these prospective international adoptive parents couldn’t have video calls or interact with the children in any way. They would receive photobooks featuring the faces of “available children,” pick the ones they wanted, Holt’s agency would handle the paperwork in Seoul, and voila, they would have a kid.

You can imagine what an adoption done by proxy looked like. Who was verifying the parents’ identities? With the law for adoptions so lax in Korea, who was making sure the children being sent actually had no parents? Holt’s system had effectively made adoptions easier by removing all barriers that could have complicated or slowed the process, and, in doing so, he had also removed the guardrails that make adoption stories beautiful.

He had built Amazon, but for children, and even Amazon had more safety guardrails than his system did.

By the early 1960s, the biracial children were running out, but the demand from Western families was not. And for something that had become so lucrative, supply couldn’t run out, so the adoption agencies chose to expand what they were willing to call an orphan, even if it meant “parent left him here for a minute.”

The Beginning of Brother’s Home

South Korea is known for the Miracle on the Han River because Park Chung-hee, the general who seized power in a 1961 coup, took drastic measures to industrialise the nation within 30 years. And in this case, “drastic measures” meant he was willing to turn a blind eye to certain aspects of his nation to achieve economic growth. Social welfare was near zero; there were no meaningful public systems to support abandoned, orphaned, or desperately poor families.

Instead, he legitimised the use of private welfare facilities subsidised by the government on a per-inmate basis. That meant that with every new inmate, the government saved money by paying only a fraction of what it would cost to run a state welfare system.

On October 26, 1979, President Park Chung-hee was assassinated by his own spy chief, and the general in charge of investigating the murder, Chun Doo-hwan, decided to use the opportunity to launch his own coup. He officially became president on September 1st, 1980. Of course, if you’ve just taken over from a high-performing president, there’s the pressure to prove you’re even better.

And Chun had the perfect opportunity to show the world his abilities with Seoul being confirmed as the host city of the 1988 Summer Olympics. That meant South Korea had a chance to stand before the entire watching world and present itself as a modern, prosperous, developed nation under the leadership of President Chun Doo-hwan.

On October 8, 1981, Chun issued a direct presidential order to his Prime Minister to make sure there were no panhandlers on the streets of Seoul before the 1988 Olympics. And supporting it was a government directive that had been sitting on the books since 1975, Ministry of Home Affairs Ordinance No. 410, which defined vagrants as anyone who “prevents a healthy social order in cities and society.”

Local police and city officials were empowered to decide, on the spot, who was a vagrant. Patrol teams were formed. And as the Olympics approached, the number of detainees surged from around 14,000 in 1983 to over 16,000 in 1986. These were ordinary people who were arrested based on unfounded suspicions and accusations, not people who had actually committed a crime.

An example of the kind of people who were arrested was eleven year old Hwang Jung-bok, who was separated from his mother at Busan train station. He searched for her for an hour, then did exactly what an eleven-year-old would do: he went to a police station to ask for help. And there must have been something in the way he asked, because just a few moments later, he was pushed into a truck, and as he told Al Jazeera decades later, “it was the end of the real Hwang Jung-bok’s life, and the beginning of my nightmare.”

There was also the case of Yeon Seng-mo, who was fifteen and working full-time at a Chinese restaurant in Seoul, when he took a day trip to the beach in Busan. He had cash in his wallet, money he had earned, but on that day, when the police stopped him, they accused him of stealing it. He was thrown onto a truck, and that was the end of life as he had always known it.

One of the government-authorized private welfare facilities where these “vagrants” were being taken to was the Brothers Home.

Brothers Home started as an orphanage in 1960 with 60 children and enough foreign donations to keep it running. It was a basic shelter in Busan’s Gamman-dong neighborhood. However, as donations dried up in the late 1960s, the facility began to change. By 1975, a retired military man and deeply religious social worker named Park In-geun took formal control, and things became different.

He signed a contract with the city of Busan, relocated to the Jurye-dong hillside, began receiving inmates, and receiving government subsidies for every inmate he housed.

More people meant more money. So Park In-geun went out and got more people. He was the kind of guy who liked to go the extra mile, so instead of waiting around for the police to deliver inmates, he had trucks sent out to drive through the streets of Busan to collect anyone they deemed a vagrant. Was this legal?

Well, if your definition of legal is that the law enforcement, the Ministry of Home Affairs, and the mayor’s office knew and looked the other way because Brothers Home was helping them clear the streets and keeping the city the way the government wanted it to look, then sure, it was.

By the early 1980s, the compound housed more than 4,000 people at its peak. And the compound itself had been built by the people inside it. In the early years, inmates slept in tents on the hillside while they constructed the concrete facility they would then be imprisoned in. Then they were put to work in its factories, making things like pencils, fishing hooks, cocktail umbrellas, clothing, shoes, woodwork, and metalwork.

About twenty factories were operating simultaneously, churning out goods for export abroad for profit. The workers received nothing. Or almost nothing. One former worker told Al Jazeera he received $160 for eight years of labor.

The Brothers Home, supposedly an orphanage, was operated like a military base. One of the inmates was appointed as the compound commander. Below him were platoon leaders, and below them were ordinary inmates organized into units and governed by strict rules enforced with bats and fists.

A day at the Brothers’ Home would usually start at 5:30 AM with hymns and a sermon. Park In-geun’s brother-in-law, Lim Young-soon, was a newly ordained pastor and would take the sermons. After the very mandatory-unless-you-want-to-be-punished assemblies, the next thing was a seventeen-hour workday, and punishment for anyone who didn’t meet their target.

Hwang Jung-bok, the eleven year old, who had been taken for the “crime” of looking for his mother, said inmates were beaten with wooden bats if they fidgeted or fell asleep during morning service. If several were caught dozing, the entire platoon was forced to sing hymns through the night.

If you tried to escape, you were caught and put on trial in the compound’s church, where, in front of thousands of fellow inmates, you would be publicly chastised and beaten. After that, Pastor Lim would take over and talk about God and Jesus, about forgiveness and the mercy of the institution. Then everyone would go back to work.

Hwang Jung-bok tried to escape multiple times. He was caught every time. And each time, he would be beaten up, and the sermon would follow. During special holidays like Christmas and Easter, when local dignitaries and international guests would come to see the exemplary welfare center, he would play Jesus in the compound’s Christian plays.

He was a prisoner performing the crucifixion for people who thought they were watching a charity production. He would go on to spend ten years at Brothers Home, finally leaving at the age of twenty-one. His entire childhood gone because someone decided he was a vagrant.

In cases where some of the inmates couldn’t work, wouldn’t work, or got sick, they employed other methods. Brothers Home purchased 250,000 tablets of chlorpromazine in 1986 alone. That is a powerful antipsychotic drug, used clinically to treat severe mental illness. At Brothers Home, it was used as a chemical restraint to keep the population quiet and compliant.

The facility also purchased haloperidol, flurazepam, and carbamazepine the same year. When the Busan city government was asked about this in 1987, they explained that these were over-the-counter drugs purchased for medical purposes.

South Korea’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission published a report in 2022 that confirmed that between 1975 and 1986, 657 people died inside Brothers Home. The facility’s own death records frequently listed victims as already dead upon arrival at the hospital, a notation the commission interpreted as indicating either catastrophic health conditions from overcrowding and starvation, or an attempt to conceal deaths caused by beatings and torture. The bodies of some who died were dumped in the woods outside the compound.

When a man named Kang filed a formal petition in 1982 asking authorities to investigate his brother’s mistreatment at Brothers Home, the Busan Bukbu Police Station arranged a meeting between Kang and Park In-geun. And that was all they did. Then Park took legal action against Kang for the false accusation, resulting in Kang being sentenced to eight months in prison.

In the early 1980s, Chun Doo-hwan’s own administration issued Park In-geun a formal certificate of achievement for remarkable work in addressing homelessness and vagrancy in Busan. He had cleared the streets. He had given valuable skills to unfortunate individuals. A 1981 government film even celebrated Brothers Home as an exemplary social welfare center.

The Brothers Home - Holt Connection

Now here is the part that the Holt story connects to.

Inside the Brothers Home, there was a nursery. It held up to 80 infants and toddlers at any given time, from newborns up to 4-year-olds. A boy named Lee Chae-sik worked there in the early 1980s, and once a month, he was handed a stack of letters and instructed to copy them out by hand. Each letter was clipped to two photographs: one of a foreign couple, one of a Brothers Home child. Over and over, hundreds of times, Lee wrote: “We have received the money and gifts you sent us. Thank you.” The couples were addressed as yangbumo, meaning “adoptive parents.” A nanny collected the finished letters and filed the photos in a folder with one word on the front. Holt.

Days after the letters went out, children disappeared from the nursery. Twenty at a time. Forty at a time. “You would see 70 or 80 babies in the infant nursery,” Lee told the Associated Press, “and then, one day, 20 or 40 would be suddenly gone.

And it happened repeatedly.” Park Gyeong-bo, who was at Brothers Home from 1975 to 1980, said guards would occasionally dress children in clean clothes and photograph them, and those children would later disappear. Lee Hye-yul said she was seven when a Brothers Home official told her she would be sent to a family in Britain. She begged and cried for days until she was told, without explanation, that the adoption had been canceled.

Years later, investigations would reveal direct evidence that showed that at least 19 children were adopted out of Brothers Home and sent abroad, with indirect evidence pointing to at least 51 more. The adoptions took place between 1979 and 1986.

Even though Brothers Home received government subsidies for each inmate, including the infants, a child placed for international adoption generated something extra: a fee paid by the Western adoptive family to the processing agency. By the 1980s, that fee was around $5,000 per child. Brothers Home received a cut. Park In-geun would not have sent children away unless he was making more money from it than from keeping them.

The process had a paper trail that looked legitimate and was fraudulent at its core. Children brought to Brothers Home, whether swept from the street, born to a woman detained there, or transferred from another facility, were documented as abandoned. Because passing the children off as abandoned and without any known guardian was the only way to open up the path to overseas placement.

The required public notices, which were supposed to find guardians before an adoption was finalized, were filed in Seoul district offices, not Busan, where the children had actually been taken. And most notices appeared only after the adoption process had already begun.

There was one confirmed case of a child born to a woman detained at Brothers Home under Ordinance No. 410. The mother couldn’t leave the home, had no access to legal counsel, and no ability to seek outside help. Her baby was transferred to an adoption agency one month after birth, and sent overseas three months later. A signed consent form with the mother’s name was found in the file. But the commission determined there were reasonable grounds to suspect the consent was not voluntary.

Her name is not in the public record. Her child’s destination country is not specified in the documents that have been released. Somewhere in the world, there is a person in their early 40s who does not know any of this.

There is a document that exists, a physical, stamped, bureaucratic document, that says more about what happened at Brothers Home than almost anything else.

It is an intake form dated November 23, 1982. It states that a child was found in Busan’s Jurye-dong neighborhood and admitted to Brothers Home at the request of the Jurye 2-dong Police Substation. In the top corner is a black-and-white photograph of a very young girl. Her head is shaved.

The form notes her “good physique,” “normal face shape and color.” She is categorised as “healthy — capable of labour work.” At the bottom are her tiny fingerprints. Her identification number was 821112646.

She was approximately four years old.

Her name is Ju-rye Hwang. She was adopted to North America. She grew up believing her birth parents were dead, that she was alone in the world, that she had simply been found abandoned. She believed that story for decades until one day a journalist called her, told her about Brothers Home, told her the intake form existed, and told her she had been there.

But there’s an even more shocking part. Ju-rye Hwang had two younger brothers who were adopted to Belgium in early 1986, three months before her own intake form was dated. Their adoption files listed them as abandoned in Anyang, a city 300 kilometers from Busan, in August 1982.

Ju-rye now believes her parents may have been searching for those missing boys when they temporarily left her with relatives in Busan, a common Korean practice, and that she was swept up during that time. Which means there may have been parents desperately searching for all three of their children, while the system was processing all three of them as abandoned orphans and shipping them to different countries on different continents.

Other Cogs In The Wheel

Brothers Home was the most grotesque expression of the machine. But it was not the whole machine.

To understand the full scale — 170,000 to 200,000 children over seven decades — you have to understand that the same logic operating inside Brothers Home was operating, at varying degrees of violence, across South Korea’s entire adoption industry.

Private agencies needed healthy infants to satisfy Western demand, and Western demand was enormous. From the 1970s onward, two thirds of all Asian children adopted in the United States came from South Korea. In Sweden, nearly half of all internationally adopted children in the early 1970s arrived from there. Agencies were charging Western families around $5,000 per child by the 1980s, rising to $10,000 by 2000.

One estimate placed South Korea’s annual earnings from child exports at $15 to $20 million during the peak years. That’s a full-blown industry right there.

Four major agencies processed the bulk of this traffic: Holt Children’s Services, Eastern Social Welfare Society, Korea Social Service, and Social Welfare Society. They operated under light government oversight, were assessed on volume, and competed aggressively with each other for available children. In 1983, South Korea’s Health Ministry audited all four and cited every single one of them for problems.

They were making payments to impoverished birth mothers that exceeded legal limits, and a subsequent audit in 1988 confirmed Holt had made nearly 100 illegal payments to hospitals in just six months. Eastern Social Welfare Society had made even more. And the government’s response to both audits was to push the agencies to facilitate more adoptions.

When genuine orphans weren’t available in sufficient numbers, agencies manufactured them. Workers toured hospitals and orphanages hunting for healthy infants. They paid maternity homes for babies, and there were cases where parents were told their newborn had a fatal illness and died. They went home grieving, and in the meantime, their child was on a plane to meet their adoptive parents.

Records from 1980 to 1987 show that more than 90 percent of the Korean children sent abroad in that period almost certainly had known relatives who had not consented to their being adopted, and who were actively searching for them.

Single mothers were another supply source, and the system was particularly ruthless here. South Korea’s attitude toward unmarried mothers was among the most stigmatizing in the developed world. A woman who gave birth outside of marriage was socially finished. She was unable to return to her family, unable to rent an apartment without a family registry that exposed her status, and unable to hold most jobs.

Three of the four major agencies ran their own maternity homes where pregnant women could stay during their pregnancies. And none of them were doing it for the mother’s benefit. The workers would counsel the women to surrender their children, telling them their babies would have better lives with Western families and that good homes were waiting, so this was the loving choice.

Internal Holt documents from 1988 show workers reassuring mothers that their children might come back someday as doctors or engineers. The mothers were sent home with nothing. The infrastructures that might have allowed a woman to actually keep her child, welfare support, affordable housing, and legal protection from discrimination were all unavailable because the government had done the math, and exporting children was cheaper.

At its peak in 1985, South Korea sent 8,837 children abroad in a single year. That’s an average of twenty-four children every day for twelve months.

What Happened To The Children?

Before 2000, a child adopted by American parents did not automatically become an American citizen. Citizenship had to be actively filed for by the adoptive parents, and many did not know that. They assumed it was automatic. The Child Citizenship Act of 2000 fixed this, but only for adoptees who were under 18 when the law passed.

And since anyone adopted before 1983 was already an adult, they were excluded. The Adoptee Rights Campaign estimates that approximately 18,600 Korean-American adoptees currently live in the United States without citizenship.

One of them was Phillip Clay. He was born Kim Sang-pil in Seoul in 1974, was found abandoned in 1981, and was adopted by a Philadelphia family two years later, at the age of eight. Having grown up in America, English was the only language he knew. He couldn’t speak Korean, knew nobody in Korea, and because his adoptive parents had never filed for his citizenship, he didn’t belong to America either.

As an adult, he developed mental illness, had addiction issues, and accumulated a rap sheet that led to him being deported back to the country he had been shoved out of as a child. This was a country that was his if you were judging by his face, but also one where he could not read a street sign, fill out a form, or even explain himself to a doctor. That kind of isolation can be torture to the average adult, and combined with his mental and addiction struggles, his life became a revolving door between shelters, jails, and mental health facilities, where it was difficult to communicate with the staff.

His story got even worse when he was arrested in Korea for assault and sentenced to prison for two years. When he was released in December 2016, life must have decided to play a twist of fate on him because he was placed in a rehabilitation program run by Holt International. The same organization had processed his adoption to Philadelphia three decades earlier.

Five months later, on May 21, 2017, Phillip Clay took an elevator to the fourteenth floor of an apartment building in Ilsan and jumped. He was 42 years old at the time, and his story ended with his ashes returned to Philadelphia in a cardboard box marked fragile.

There’s also the story of Adam Crasper. He was born Shin Seong-hyeok and adopted by a Michigan family in 1979 at age three. His first adoptive family, Thomas and Dolly Crapser, were later convicted of criminal mistreatment of foster and adopted children. He was then re-adopted by a second family who were themselves prosecuted in 1992 for physical abuse and assault against their charges.

Neither family ever filed his citizenship paperwork, and when he applied to renew his green card in 2012, his criminal record triggered enforcement proceedings. In November 2016, after 37 years in the United States, in the only country he had ever known, he was deported to South Korea, leaving behind a wife and two daughters.

The difference between Crasper and Clay, one could say, was that they protested in vastly different ways. Where one protested by taking the burden on himself, so much so that he ended his life, the other decided to protest against the people who were responsible for his burden.

In 2019, Crasper sued the South Korean government and Holt Children’s Services, becoming the first Korean adoptee ever to do so. His lawsuit accused Holt of falsifying his paperwork to describe him as an orphan despite a known biological mother, of placing him with abusive families after failing to conduct proper background checks, and of never following up on whether he had received citizenship. His lawyer described what had happened to him as similar to human trafficking. In 2023, a lower Seoul court ruled in his favor, the first time a Korean adoption agency had ever been held financially liable for a failed adoption, and ordered Holt to pay roughly $68,600 in damages.

However, Holt Children’s Services appealed, and the Seoul High Court overturned the ruling in January 2025. And their logic was, since the adoptive parents were responsible for filing for citizenship, Holt and the South Korean government couldn’t be held responsible. Plus, the adoption laws of the period in question made it so that both parties were within the law.

Crapser now lives in Mexico. The Adoptee Citizenship Act, which would close the legal loophole that led to his deportation, has been introduced in the US Congress multiple times. However, it’s turning out to be a forever battle because it’s still being “reviewed in committee. So far, it just feels like a never ending loop where the villains get away over and over.

What Happened To The Villains?

In December 1986, a prosecutor named Kim Yong-won heard a rumor from a hunter in Ulju County that men were being forced to log a mountain under armed guard. Upon investigations, he found a Brothers Home work site and raided the main facility in Busan in January 1987. After rounding up and interviewing more than 100 inmates, he built a case that prosecutors believed warranted 15 years and a fine of 600 million won. Park In-geun, the mastermind behind brothers home, received two and a half years and no fine.

Kim later said that officials from Chun Doo-hwan’s office had directly blocked his investigation because the government apparently feared an embarrassing international incident weeks before the Olympics. Park appealed the sentence, and the Daegu High Court stripped the illegal confinement charges. The Supreme Court also acquitted Park of all imprisonment-related offenses. The only charge that stuck was the embezzlement, and after Park served thirty months, he was granted an Australian Visa in 1989.

You would think that an embezzlement charge would at least be enough to confiscate Park’s wealth, especially the 2 billion won that had been found in his safe during the raid in his compound. But nope, because apparently, while Park was chilling in prison, his family was moving his estate to Australia, where they bought a golf course and built a sports complex.

This man, directly and indirectly responsible for more than 600 deaths, the kidnapping and torture of innocent individuals, and many other crimes moved to Sydney as a wealthy magnate, started to run a business, and to add insult to injury, opened a church.

His brother-in-law, Lim Young-soon, the pastor who had delivered the morning sermons after punishments, had gone to Sydney with him, his permanent residency sponsored by a Korean Presbyterian congregation there. Apparently, they were unaware of his history. When journalists contacted him, he denied being a director at Brothers home, even though his name was on several official documents.

In 2016, Park In-geun died in a nursing home in Sydney at a ripe old age. He was never found guilty of a single human rights violation. His daughter currently runs the family’s sports complex in Sydney’s outer suburbs. One would almost think it pays to be a villain.

But maybe the one good thing is that survivors from these crimes have refused to stop fighting.

Hahn Jong-seon, one of the survivors who had been taken with his sister when he was eight after his father asked him to wait for him at the local police station, stood in front of the National Assembly in Seoul, alone, holding a sign showing a photograph of himself at nine years old. He stood there for an entire year, silently protesting the injustice that was done to him, before other survivors began to join him.

In April 2015, a group of survivors shaved their heads as a demonstration. In December, Hahn began a hunger strike. In September 2017, he and dozens of others walked 500 kilometers from the Brothers Home site in Busan to the Blue House in Seoul. They walked for two months, and in November of that year, they set up a permanent sit-in outside the National Assembly. They were there for years.

In 2018, South Korea’s Prosecutor General issued a public apology, not for Brothers Home itself, but for the prosecution’s failure to adequately pursue the case in 1987. An apology for failing to hold someone accountable is not the same as holding someone accountable. But it was what the survivors got.

It also triggered the relaunch of South Korea’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, in December 2020, and their investigations confirmed state culpability for Brothers Home in August 2022. In January 2025, the commission confirmed 31 improper overseas adoptions, identified 17 biological mothers, and formally found that the required public notices had been conducted in bad faith. It recommended that the state issue a formal apology, take steps to restore victims’ identities, and locate missing persons. However, there’s still no apology.

It was initially scheduled for December 4, 2024, but the date happened to be just after President Yoon Suk Yeol declared martial law, which led to his own impeachment, so it was postponed indefinitely. The minister who was to deliver the apology resigned in the chaos, and it has not been rescheduled.

So far, there have been 367 adoptees from 11 countries who have filed petitions asking the commission to investigate their international adoptions. The commission confirmed violations in 56 cases but suspended the remaining 311 on the grounds of internal disagreements and an approaching mandate deadline. Those 311 cases have passed to a newly mandated commission, and investigation has not yet begun.

And somewhere right now, there is a person in their 40s who was told they were abandoned, and has believed it their entire life, and who does not yet know that their intake form is sitting in a file somewhere with tiny fingerprints at the bottom.

Key Takeaways

• South Korea sent 170,000 to 200,000 children abroad for adoption, driven by economic and social policies.
• The Brothers Home in Busan was a notorious facility where children were exploited for labor and adoption.
• Adoption agencies in South Korea faced minimal oversight and often manufactured orphans to meet demand.
• Many adopted children faced citizenship issues and struggled with identity and belonging.
• Survivors of the adoption and labor exploitation continue to fight for justice and recognition.

Frequently Asked Questions

How many Korean children were sent to adoptive families internationally?

Between 170,000 and 200,000 Korean children were sent to adoptive families in the United States, Western Europe, and Australia.

What was the initial motivation behind South Korea’s international adoption program?

The South Korean government wanted to rebrand the country as modern, advanced, wealthy, and ethically pure, which included sending away biracial children resulting from the Korean War.

Who was Harry Holt and what role did he play in the international adoption program?

Harry Holt was an American farmer who adopted eight Korean children in 1955. His actions gained media attention and led to the establishment of Holt International Children’s Services, which facilitated the adoption of thousands of Korean children by Western families.

What was the Brothers Home and how was it connected to the international adoption program?

The Brothers Home was a government-authorized private welfare facility in Busan that housed thousands of people, including children who were later adopted internationally. It was connected to Holt International Children’s Services, which facilitated the adoption of children from the Brothers Home.

What were the conditions like at the Brothers Home?

The Brothers Home was operated like a military base with strict rules enforced through violence. Inmates were forced to work long hours in factories, received little to no pay, and were subjected to harsh punishments. Many children were adopted from the Brothers Home without proper verification of their parental status.

How did the South Korean government benefit from the international adoption program?

The South Korean government benefited financially by subsidizing private welfare facilities on a per-inmate basis, which was cheaper than running a state welfare system. Additionally, the adoption fees paid by Western families generated significant revenue.

What happened to the children who were adopted internationally?

Many adoptees faced challenges such as lack of citizenship, mental health issues, and deportation back to South Korea. Some adoptees, like Phillip Clay and Adam Crasper, struggled with identity, mental health, and legal issues in their adoptive countries.

What was the outcome for Park In-geun, the mastermind behind the Brothers Home?

Park In-geun received a lenient sentence of two and a half years for embezzlement and was later granted an Australian visa. He moved to Sydney, started a business, and opened a church. He died in 2016 without being found guilty of any human rights violations.

What efforts have been made to address the injustices of the international adoption program?

Survivors have protested and demanded justice, leading to public apologies and investigations by South Korea’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission. However, a formal apology and comprehensive restitution have not yet been achieved.

How did the international adoption program impact single mothers in South Korea?

Single mothers in South Korea faced severe stigma and were often coerced into giving up their children for adoption. The system provided little support for single mothers, making adoption a seemingly inevitable choice.

Sources

• Original Into the Shadows video: South Korea Sold Its Children to the World…
• Hero image source by P. Horálek/ESO / openverse, by.

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