Left in the dark: examining Australian adoptions from South Korea

Many of the 3,600 adoptees, now aged in their thirties, had unusually similar case files: born to a single mother, and orphaned. In interviews with the ABC, adult adoptees said their own research had proven their biological parents were alive and had been misled in some cases into believing their child would be adopted by a Korean family. South Korea’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission is now investigating hundreds of adoptee cases and has already confirmed an extensive campaign of deceptive falsification of documents. Australia has not launched an official investigation.

In August, Senator Linda Reynolds called for a broader parliamentary inquiry into intercountry adoption practices, seeking a stop to all international adoptions until more comprehensive safeguards are in place to prevent “trafficking” of orphans.

Quiet migration poses concern over processes

As Melbourne University academics Jay Song and Ryan Gustafsson wrote in 2023, while intercountry is a form of migration, it is not often viewed as such. They wrote in their paper ‘Korean Adoption to Australia as Quiet and Orderly Child Migration’ that “Adoption involves what Anne Collinson (2007) has termed ‘the littlest immigrants’ who, as children, are disempowered and not afforded a voice, and rarely portrayed in the Western media as immigrants. Child/infant migrants remain in the shadow of their adult custodians. They have no agency nor the means to express their consent in the migration and settlement process, which is often considered a private, family affair.”

That said, they also add: “Korean transnational adoption has led to the quiet and orderly movement of children, and that the very ‘quietness’ of the adoption system is a source of concern despite Australia’s adoption regulations, which are widely regarded as more stringent than in other receiving countries such as the US.”

Professor Denise Cuthbert is the Associate Deputy Vice Chancellor of Research Training and Development at RMIT University in Melbourne.

Cuthbert has published extensively on child adoption, child removal, and child placement. With Marian Quartly and Shurlee Swain, she co-authored “The Market in Babies: Stories of Adoption in Australia” in 2013, and with Ceridwen Spark edited “Other People’s Children: Adoption in Australia” in 2009. Her research has investigated Indigenous child removal, intercountry adoption, adoption policy and practice, the management of children in disasters, and child abuse in Malaysia.

She tells LSJ, “The key thing to bear in mind when looking at the history of adoption and the laws which enable this practice over time is that overwhelmingly, this is a history of pressures brought to bear on state and territory governments by prospective adoptive parents in search of babies with whom to form families. The interests of these parents have shaped adoption laws – until the reforms which commenced in the mid-1980s after concerted activism by adoptees and mothers who has lost children to adoption.”

Policies governing intercountry adoption were, for the most part, those which pertained to domestic adoption, Professor Cuthbert explains.

“Remember, in many cases domestic adoption in its heyday was far from ethical and transparent in addressing the desires and interests of birth mothers or their children as they were biased towards the interests of the adopting parents. Thus, it can be said that this policy framework was far from adequate in ensuring the interests of parties other than adoptive parents.”

The international reach of a flawed adoption system

A major investigation by the Associated Press has revealed Australia was among the Western nations that were engaged in a fraudulent, illegal adoption system in which babies from South Korea were kidnapped, provided false identification documents, and provided to Australian, American, and European families. The South Korean parents were told their children were terminally ill or dead. While Scandinavian countries and US states have since stopped adoptions from South Korea following outcry from organisations and individuals who recognised the illegality of what was happening, Australians had been able to adopt formally right up to the beginning of this year. However, late last year – likely owing to this investigation – South Korea advised they would not be accepting adoption applications from any Australian prospective parents in 2024.

In May, the Netherlands announced it would no longer allow its citizens to adopt from overseas. Denmark’s only international adoption agency announced its imminent closure, Sweden stopped adoptions from South Korea, and Norway is investigating its own processes. Switzerland issued an apology for failing to prevent illegal adoptions, while in March, France made public an assessment of its own culpability, revealing numerous flaws in its system. Both the US and Australia have failed to investigate, nor admit fault.

Professor Cuthbert says, “To its shame, South Korea has relied on ICA [Intercountry Adoption] to avoid providing social services and support for single mothers and their children. Due to the shame and stigma of pregnancy outside of marriage, and a desire to avoid the costs to the state of providing for these mothers and their children, South Korea effectively sanctioned the removal of these children for adoption and there were many bad actors in this space – several ‘charitable’ and church-aligned organisations operated effectively as baby brokers or traffickers. Many so-called orphanages were used by local people as places to leave their children on a temporary basis during times of economic duress and they has no understanding that by so doing they were effectively relinquishing their children who then were classified as ‘orphans’ and available for adoption.”

The fundamental problem, she reiterates, is that birth mothers and their children are not given the same consideration as adoptive parents.

Professor Cuthbert says, “Inevitably this creates the conditions for the commodification of children and the erasure of their rights – in fact, adoption policy frequently assumes that the rights and interests of the child are aligned with those of the adoptive parents and that adoption will serve the interests of that child. This ignores the rights of children which may be independent of the rights and interests of the adoptive parents – such as their rights to know their birth parents, and the culture of their birth, at least.”

Conflict and economic disaster leads to a fertile market

Professor Cuthbert says, “The political pressures mounted over time by intending parents who are biologically or socially infertile, and this demographic now includes members of LGBTQ+ communities, is such that as one source of children with whom to form family closes, these intending parents moves to find a new source of babies – hence an evolving market in babies over time.”

As domestic adoption dried up with the advent of the contraceptive pill, the single mothers benefit, and changing social mores around single motherhood, intending parents moved to offshore sources in largely unregulated markets, Professor Cuthbert explains.

As those countries increased regulation around the adoption of their children, prospective parents moved to other source countries with less regulation.

She says, “You can readily trace this evolving, morphing market and its various hotspots over the years – [for example] various Latin American countries, China, Eastern European countries, African countries. Sometimes, geopolitical and natural disasters create a high-traffic, short-term market in so-called ‘orphans’ who are swooped up by agencies for intending parents in the west.

“Because of the relative affluence, their political lobbying in their home countries and the persistence of the myths of adoption as rescue, both policy and popular discourse around intercountry adoption frame it as a good thing that benefits all.  Much of the same thing is currently being played out with respect to offshore surrogacy – the latest new market for babies.”

Professor Cuthbert points to the falsely ‘heroic’ baby-lift during the fall of Saigon in 1975 when many so-called orphans were not actual orphans.

Lynelle Long is the founder of InterCountry Adoptee Voices (ICAV), founded in 1998. She is a Sydney-based Vietnamese adoptee.

In 2019, Lynelle was invited to represent ICAV at The Hague Working Group to Prevent & Address Illicit Practices in Intercountry Adoption and in 2022, she brought together a global team of leaders to represent the intercountry adoptee community at the 2022 Special Commission Hague Convention Meetings. This was the first time a broad number of adoptive countries and birth countries had representation from adoptees at the Hague Special Commission meetings. In 2022, she was invited to represent a collaboration of intercountry adoptee groups named Voices Against Illegal Adoption (VAIA) to the United Nations on illegal adoptions. On 29 Sept 2022, the UN released their Joint Statement on Illegal Intercountry Adoptions.

Long explains to LSJ that, “the Australian government Department of Social Services [DSS], and previously the Attorney-General’s Department (AGD), have treated it as a hot potato that they’ve claimed is the responsibility of the state and territories. There have been mixed responses when adoptees do write to their state government. In South Australia, there’s been funding made available to adoptees, whether that’s to be reunited with their parent in the case of an adoptee from India, or travel expenses for an adoptee from Taiwan to meet with the Taiwanese government to meet her perpetrator who was convicted and imprisoned for falsification of paperwork, child trafficker Julie Chu.”

Long’s fundamental concern is that to seek support and reparation, adoptees must go to the same institutions, agencies and government departments that facilitated and financially benefited from the adoption system that is so riddled with flaws. The only just way to address adoptees who believe their adoptions were illegal is to install an independent, national and international body that can investigate and organise legal and financial support for adoptees to engage with their birthplace government and adoptive governments; a necessary measure to find and reclaim identification documents and to seek compensation if they desire.

In Long’s case, she was born in the middle of the Vietnam War. Her Victorian-based adoptive parents paid for the services of a Vietnamese lawyer to facilitate her adoption. They were directed to pay into a French bank account. She had been sourced from a large maternity hospital days after her birth, and her father flew to Vietnam to retrieve her.

“Australia didn’t have processes, despite a reputation for stringent systems, when I arrived in 1973. The only documentation I had from Vietnam is a passport that got me out of Vietnam, and that’s the only paperwork I have about myself.”

For 17 years, Long was not formally adopted, until she sought a Victorian driver’s license but did not have the necessary identification to secure it.

She recalls, “My family reached out to the Victorian Adoption department in 1990, which facilitated the adoption based on my passport, one home visit and report. Why didn’t a social worker ask about a proper adoption process for a child from Vietnam who had lived with this family for 17 years?”

Long received an apology from the Department of Home Affairs, represented by then-Minister of Immigration, Andrew Giles, following her participation in the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse. She had experienced sexual abuse in her adoptive family for years, for which her father plead guilty last year. The abuse occurred while she was technically under the guardianship of the Lutherans and the Home Affairs Department until her formal adoption at 17.

“That experience: restoration, acknowledgement and apology, was a blueprint for what needs to happen for victim-survivors of illegal adoptions,” she says.

“As victims, when we go to the institutions for help, we have to go to those that have a vested interest in protecting themselves. Who the hell do we turn to that’s going to be independent? This is a system that has perpetuated these historic wrongs.”

Long says, “What’s needed is laws that allow certain practices to be criminalised. There is no legislation that enables victims to hold entities accountable for what they do. The closest we get is that it’s illegal to falsify someone’s identity, which is a slap on the wrist for a tiny aspect of the human rights abuses inflicted on [adoptees].”

She believes the 1993 Hague Convention, which Australia is a signatory to, is a toothless tiger that mostly provides for adoptive parents’ needs, rather than the children.

In not relying upon an independent party to verify that orphan adoption paperwork is legitimate, “adoptive countries continue to turn a blind eye, showing how complicit they are in the trade of children,” says Long.