By Kelly Condit-Shrestha

The 2019 Brothers Home scandal—and adoption agencies’ non-response—is symptomatic of transnational Korean adoption’s historic and current priorities as an industry: the procurement of “adoptable” children over the maintenance of ethical child placement practice and above the welfare of South Korea’s most vulnerable citizens.

On November 9, 2019, The Associated Press exposed how Brothers Home, a South Korean compound that illegally imprisoned, abused, and enslaved thousands of Korean “undesirables”—“the homeless, the drunk, but mostly children and the disabled”—during the 1970s and 1980s also operated as “a massive profit-seeking enterprise that thrived [as] an orphanage pipeline feeding the demand of private adoption agencies.” As of November 18, 2019, the horrifying details evidenced in an Associated Press (AP) news story resulted in near dismissal within the transnational adoption industry. Rather, reflecting the laissez-faire attitudes, if not outright scorn, that overseas adopted Koreans often face from adoption agencies—within the disciplining critique to be more “grateful”—U.S. agencies Children’s Home Society  of California, Children’s Home Society of Minnesota, Dillon International, and Spence-Chapin, “refused to try” to verify those Brothers adoptions that the AP confirmed during its records review. South Korean agency Eastern Social Welfare Society, who “paid Brothers $10 a month for every child at the facility in 1972… responded with irritation.” In this way, the 2019 Brothers Home scandal, and adoption agencies’ subsequent reactions, reflect the industry’s historic capitalist priorities to secure a sufficient supply of “adoptable” children above the ethics or accountability regarding where exactly those children came from.

Overseas Korean adoption is responsible for the outflow of more than 200,000 South Korean children, the majority of whom were sent to the United States, to be placed into primarily white American families. As I detail in my article, “South Korea and Adoption’s Ends,” beginning in the mid-1960s, the system that is transnational Korean adoption has sustained itself by intentionally exploiting South Korea’s most vulnerable populations in order to procure an adequate supply of “available” children and cater to the overseas market demands of prospective adoptive parents—in other words, the practices of Brothers Home.

By the late 1950s, international Korean adoption was on the decline. A smaller number of children were being voluntarily relinquished and this population had shifted from mixed-race to full Korean children. But rather than support this shift toward better domestic family preservation, adoption agencies instituted competitive recruitment campaigns. Social workers actively sought out women engaged in the many sex work economies that proliferated alongside U.S. military installations, and subsequently produced large populations of mixed-race children. There, agency and orphanage workers bribed, pressured, and coerced the mothers to give up their children. By 1966, Korean international adoption began to increase at an exponential and unprecedented rate.

Between 1958 and 1990, the poverty-induced-abandonment of adopted Korean children steadily decreased from 66.1 percent to 10.4 percent, before plummeting to less-than-one-percent by 2004, the height of global international adoptions. At the same time, the adoption industry’s obtainment of adoptable children from South Korea’s vulnerable female citizens became increasingly organized, systematized, and effective. By the 1970s, Korean “factory girls,” the large population of young, poor, single women mobilized as cheap labor in South Korea’s urban centers, had replaced the camptown women of U.S. military bases. Beginning in the 1980s, factory girls were replaced by a new population of unwed mothers—women who were not poverty-stricken but weighted down by the social stigma of single motherhood. Over the next two decades, agency-funded maternity homes emerged, and were refined, as an efficient industry technology to secure the children of this smaller target population. Between 1958 and 1990, unwed mothers’ children progressed from 9 percent to 72.2 percent of Korea’s adoption population; by 2004, they accounted for nearly-one-hundred-percent of those children placed out.

Since the 1990s, overseas adopted Koreans—through fortitude, strength, and persistence—have increasingly gained access to their adoption records. As more adoptees gain this access, it has become clear that the Brothers Home adoption scandal is not an anomaly. Rather, the deliberately inaccurate recording and “laundering” of Korean children’s identities to produce “abandoned” or “orphaned” entities available for international child placement is mainstream agency practice. Despite these facts, as well as the historically coercive measures that sit at the heart of overseas Korean adoption’s longevity and industry prosperity, Korean transnational adoption has successfully avoided the accusation of child trafficking. This is in large part due to its ability to perform as an above-board bureaucracy that operates within the bounds of international law.

For example, as a college student, I interviewed my adoptive parents as part of an auto-ethnographic project. Within that interview, my parents were able to neatly explain that the high cost of adopting a Korean child was due mainly to the administrative and procedural expenses, in particular, the “paperwork… There was just so much paperwork.” But it is this paperwork—or rather the inaccuracies, restricted access, or lack thereof—that protects the overseas Korean adoption industry from ethical or legal accountability. As the AP details, U.S. adoption agencies and South Korean government officials repeatedly cited “an inability to check old files,” “privacy issues,” “documents… lost, destroyed or withheld,” as an excuse to deny culpability.

Korean adoptees continue to push the transnational adoption industry toward more ethical practice. But as history and present-day systems evidence, until adoptees are granted complete access to their records, overseas Korean adoption will continue to function without proper oversight, and within flexible ethical standards that prioritize the financial gain of overseas child placement over the humane commitment toward those children and their original families. If records are meant to be sealed and adoptions meant to remain “closed,” what then are the motivations for record keepers to maintain accurate documentation? Until this time of policy revision, agency and government officials’ non-responses to the Brothers Home scandal emphasizes how a continued validation of poor record-keeping also serves as validation for the continued traffic of Korean children, camouflaged under the false banner of bureaucratic legitimacy and industry “respectability.”

Kelly Condit-Shrestha is a transnational U.S. historian of migration, childhood, adoption, and critical race, and an adopted Korean American. The ideas in this blog post are explored further in her article, South Korea and Adoption’s Ends: Reexamining the Numbers and Historicizing Market Economies,” Adoption & Culture (2018), and chapter contribution in the forthcoming edited collection, Children and Youth as Subjects, Objects, Agents (Palgrave Macmillan). She is currently working on a book manuscript, tentatively titled: Adoption and American Empire: Migration, Race-Making, and the Child, 1845-1988.