Child Laundering in Korea Led to New Special Adoption Law

“In the United States, a country where adoptees must undergo a separate procedure to obtain citizenship, more than a few adoptees never become naturalized, partly due to indifference from their adoptive parents.

According to South Korea’s health and welfare ministry and an activist group devoted to Korean adoptees’ human rights, there are 23,000 Korean adoptees in the U.S. whose citizenship status the groups do not know.

The figure represents about 20 percent of some 110,000 adoptees sent to America over the past 60 years since the 1950-53 Korean War.

A majority of those 23,000, in fact, appear to have obtained

U.S. nationality but the true figure remains unknown due to local adoption agencies’ poor management of post-adoption information.

“Most of the unconfirmed cases may be caused by the agencies’ failure to inform the government of information on adoptees’ acquisition of U.S. nationality,” said Rev. Kim Do-hyun of the activist group KoRoot. “But several thousand of them are still believed to be living without any nationality.”

In recent years, a sizable number of adoptees have been deported to Korea after being convicted of criminal charges while living overseas without becoming citizens of the country in which they live.

“As far as I know, there are more than 100,000 adoptees who voluntarily returned or were deported to South Korea while living without nationality,” Kim said. “But the actual number may be larger than this when the number of people who live in South Korea without telling others they were deported, for fear of possible disadvantages, is counted.”

The returnees are often unwelcome in Korean society, also.

Except for those with professional skills or fluency in the Korean language, most face language and cultural barriers.
Some return to locate their biological parents and find their true Korean identity only to discover that all the personal information they thought they knew about themselves was fabricated to facilitate their adoption.

Michael Kang, 36, was a victim of such so-called “child laundering.”

The young man, whose original Korean name is Kang Yong-mun, returned to South Korea in 2006, nearly 23 years after being sent for adoption to the U.S.

After his return, Kang discovered he has two different family registries, including the original with the names of his actual Korean family members. The second family registry, forged by a local agency that matched children with families wanting to adopt, described him as an orphan although his parents were alive, in order to bypass the U.S. adoption rule that only orphans can be adopted without parental approval.

Kang was one of the lucky ones, as he eventually located and met his Korean parents, back here in South Korea.
“After comparing two registries — one from my biological father and the other discovered by my friend — I came to know that the documents used for (my) adoption were fabricated,” Kang said. “I felt that the Korean adoption system is corrupt and I was abandoned,” he said, recalling that discovery with anger.

Kang said his first adoption failed due to ill-treatment by his adoptive parents and he underwent repeated adoptions and dissolutions. “It was like I had lived someone else’s life,” he said.

Child laundering was so common among local adoption agencies in the past that South Korea became notorious as one of the world’s largest exporters of “orphans.” A new law that came into effect in August of this year requires the birth certificate of the child be included in the documents required for any adoption.

The total number of Korean-born children adopted to foreign parents reached 164,000 as of this year. Holt Children’s Services Inc., a Seoul-based adoption agency, said the number of children available for adoption has halved since the law went into effect.

Adoption agencies argue they had no other way but to fabricate facts and circumstances about the children they sought to place in order to provide them with new homes, because in many cases the children were living in orphanages and the agencies could not meet the biological parents to obtain consent.

Kang is far from the only victim of such child laundering. Jane Jeong Trenka, 40, was represented as an orphan by a local adoption agency although her mother and twin sister were alive. She was adopted by an American couple six months after her birth.

Personal records of almost all adoptees were fabricated in this way, Jeong said. After seeing fabricated documents on them while growing up, children are shocked to know that they were abandoned by their biological parents, she said, adding this constitutes violence against humans.

She called for a government role in scrutinizing adoption agencies and ensuring they provide correct personal information on adoptees.

Rev. Kim said adoption had long been considered a good deed of finding new homes for lonely children but that the unnerving truth has surfaced with the return of adult adoptees to the country.

“The nation should make efforts to create an environment in which unmarried mothers are encouraged to raise their own children rather than encouraging them to choose adoption, which separates children from their birth parents,” Kim said.

Dark side of inter-racial adoption surfaces with arrivals of grown-up adoptees

[Korea Times 10/10/12]

“While the new regulations are hoped to help stem the child trade in disguise and human rights abuses, concerns are growing over their unintended consequences in a society that highly values blood relations and deems out of wedlock births shameful.

Some fear that the new law will lead to illegal backdoor adoptions involving those who want to avoid the stigma of being a single mother or adopting a child.

Under the Special Adoption Law, which came into force in August, adoptions are put under stricter control of the state and the courts.

It requires the government to keep a central database of adoptees and gives the family court authority to approve adoptions instead of state-designated non-governmental agencies. Parents who want to give up their children must register them with the state in advance.

The nation is also seeking to join the Hague Convention on Intercountry Adoption designed to protect the human rights of children adopted overseas.

The new law was promoted by a group of Korean adoptees and lawmakers so that adoptees can be sent to better homes and later find their adoption records more easily. It passed the National Assembly in June and took effect Aug. 5.

Adoption cases from the past were fraught with falsified family records, done in order to circumvent an American regulation that states only orphans be eligible for adoption.

Adoption agencies had admitted to occasionally creating new registries for adoptees because many children were abandoned, and they were unable to track down the birth parents for consent. Using such methods, the number of international adoptions in Korea has reached over 164,000.

Additionally, international adoptees have long criticised lax adoption policies resulting in citizenship problems, as well as inadequate information regarding their birth and adoption.

Two months after the new adoption law took effect, adoption agencies and parents are still assessing how the changes will affect them and the children being adopted.

There are concerns that despite its intention, the stricter law is out of synch with Korea’s attitudes regarding single mothers and adoption.

Choi An-yeo, head of the Domestic Adoption Team at Holt Children’s Services, said that despite the change, adoption agencies would retain most of their role, such as counseling and workshops for adoptive parents and children.

“The final decision is made by the family court, but nothing changed much except you send documents to the court to wait for a verdict,” Choi said.

On the other hand, Kim Hye-gyeong, head of the Department of Family Support at Eastern Social Welfare Society, said she was unsure how the special law would affect them and found the transition process confusing.

“We sent a document to the family court for a permit exactly according to the guidelines, but were asked to make revisions,” Kim said.

Both adoption agencies were supportive of changes regarding adoptive parents. Adoptive parents will now have their financial means assessed, as well as undergo drug and alcohol addiction tests. The mandatory adoption education period also doubled from 4 to 8 hours, all of which is documented and sent to court.

Kim said that although documentation has become more complicated, the agency welcomes the tightening of the selection of adoptive parents.

Choi also said that while some feel uncomfortable, more parents submit documents and attend education workshops without protest.

“Seventy parents took the education workshops since the law changed, and although it was more taxing, they said it helped them better prepare for adoption afterward,” she said.

To ensure transparency, birth mothers must now register the baby before giving them up and adoptive parents must register the child as “adopted” in order to carry out the adoption process.

Although the child’s records transfer from the birth mother’s to the adoptive parents’ registry post-adoption, birth mothers fear the long adoption process and attending family court could expose their identities.

“Birth mothers feel uncomfortable because they fear (registering their baby) might stigmatise them for life,” Kim said.

An SBS article in September reflected the fear, reporting that the number of babies arriving at Holt dropped from the monthly average of 64 to 31 in August. Other agencies experienced a similar drop.

Meanwhile, a “baby box” where mothers can leave unwanted babies has seen an increase in abandoned babies, with mothers leaving notes saying they have nowhere else to go because of the special law.

The Ministry of Health and Welfare responded that the decreased number of babies was a temporary occurrence, and they expected adoption request rates to normalize once the new law settled.

In addition to birth mothers fearing social stigma, concerns have also been raised on the new law increasing backdoor adoptions. As Korean society still views adoption with prejudice, some adoptive parents feel uncomfortable about open adoptions.

“Most people who domestically adopted did so in secret, where they registered adopted children as their own on the family registry,” Choi said. “But under the new law that would be impossible as all adoptions will be open.”

In response, revisions have been made to the law. An example is that when adoptees ask for their centralized adoption records, they will now only view their birth parents’ last names instead of their full names and other personal information.

But there will have to be further societal changes for adoption conditions to improve. Choi echoed public criticism that support for single parents was inadequate compared to the new law limiting their choices.

The number of single mothers in shelters increased from 2,442 in 2005 to 4,074 in 2010. However, many are below the poverty level, as data from the Ministry of Gender Equality and Family showed that the average monthly income of a single mother with a child was 785,000 won in 2010, which was less than the minimum cost of living in a two-person household for 2011, 907,000 won.

Additionally, according to Korea Institute for Health and Social Affairs, 34.4 per cent of single mothers decided to give up their children for adoption because they “lack economic means,” followed by 29.8 per cent responding, “for the child’s future”.

Despite this, the government only provides minimum aid for raising children.

“As more single mothers raise their children, the government should provide more support so that they can raise children without problems,” Choi said.

Choi also said that the public perception needed to change for adoption laws to be more effective, pointing out that most domestic adoptive parents still desire non-disabled baby girls.

Kim said that the purpose of adoption is for children to find homes as soon as possible, and expressed his wish that policies were geared toward successfully sending children to homes.

“There have only been a small number of adoption requests received since the new law revisions, so we have to wait and watch for any definitive results,” Choi said.”

Fears of unintended consequences as adoption tightened

[Asia One 10/11/12 by Sang Youn-Joo/The Korea Herald]

Baby Box

The reference to Baby Box may be from this article South Korea’s new adoption law leading to more abandoned babies: pastor [Ottawa Citizen 10/8/12 by Daun Kim, Reuters]

The new regulation “has sparked a surge of undocumented babies being abandoned, said Pastor Lee  Jong-rak.

“If you look at the letters that mothers leave with their babies, they say  they have nowhere to go, and it’s because of the new law,” Lee told Reuters.

Lee, who opened his “baby box” for unwanted infants three years ago, said he  had seen the number being left there shoot up from an average of five a month to  10 in August and 14 in September. [Why would you do this instead of offering assistance to a mom in need?]

Despite the new law, Lee said he never forced mothers to provide information  about the babies they leave in the box, built into the wall of his church in  Nangok, a tough working-class neighbourhood in the capital, Seoul.

Many of the babies abandoned in the box have physical or mental disabilities.  Lee has adopted 10 of them himself and is in the process of adopting four  more.

On a recent sunny afternoon, a bell rang in his church to signal a new baby  had been left in the box, a boy about two weeks old wrapped in a blanket.

“In the past, babies used to be abandoned at night but nowadays babies are  abandoned in the daytime as well,” Lee said with a sigh.

At the moment, Lee is looking after 20 children, aged between 2 and 26, in  his cramped two-storey house. Among them, his own son.

But a Ministry of Health and Welfare official questioned Lee’s assertion that  the new law had led to more babies being dropped in the box.

“It’s hard to say there’s a specific causal relationship between the law and  babies being abandoned in the box,” said the official, who declined to be  identified.

“The sudden surge of the babies could be due to many reasons,” said the  official.

Lee has been criticised by some people who say his box encourages desperate  mothers to give up their babies. [Ya think?] But Lee says he will not close the box until he  was sure the government can offer adequate protection for abandoned babies.”

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