Massive adoption scandal of South Korea
What comes to mind when you think of South Korea k-pop, Korean skincare, cutting edge
technology south Korea has a sleek modern image a place that thrives on innovation a cultural powerhouse shaping global trends but there's another side to this country one that barely makes the headlines now, it is out in the open and it's a massive adoption scandal you see South Korea is one of the biggest exporters of children to the world .
You heard that right it is the world's biggest baby exporter since the 1950s more than 200,000 Korean babies have been adopted
overseas. Two lakh these adoptions were mostly in the US and Europe it started right after the Korean War in 1953 when South Korea was impoverished ,it was one of the poorest countries in the world so adoption was a way to deal with this poverty .Parents gave up their children many of them were abandoned so they were put up for adoption but soon it became a multi-million dollar industry. Here's what reports say south Korea earned between 15 to 20
million every year just from international adoptions and this system was run with little oversight and as we now know a shocking degree of corruption in 2022 a commission started looking into this 3 years later their findings are out and it is shocking to say the listed records were falsified .Babies were taken without consent and the entire system was
more about profits than protection here's how it worked private adoption agencies ran the show there was no government interference or oversight these agencies relied on money from adoptive parents abroad they would charge anywhere between $3,000 to $4,000 per child plus there was airfare also a $1,450 adoption fee so the more babies they placed the more cash they made and that pressure to keep up supply led to some seriously shady practices like fake birth records coercing mothers to give up their children and kids taken without consent in the last decades the adoptes that's the children who were adopted have filed hundreds of petitions they suspected that something was a miss with their adoption story so this investigation looked into 100 such cases and 56 of them were confirmed victims these were children whose families were torn apart by the scandal some even had their identities swapped and what happened to these babies and children afterwards is an entirely different story most of them went to three countries the United States Sweden and
Denmark sure some did end up in loving families and homes but many others faced neglect some were physically and sexually abused some of the adoptive parents were later deemed unfit but the adoptions went on and that is because South Korean agencies did not care all they really wanted was the money this went on for decades in recent years Soul has tightened adoption laws it has cut down on intercountry adoptions but that does not erase the damage done.The commission wants the government to apologize so far there's radio silence the question is can South Korea own up to its past while maintaining the polished high-tech trend setting image because right now the disconnect is glaring this is a nation that exports cultural excellence it must reckon with the fact that it was also exporting its own people without their consent.
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