‘Is This Really All for the Children?’: Former Korean Adoption Worker Speaks Out
In the years since Associated Press reporter Kim Tong-hyung began investigating international adoptions of South Korean children, he has spoken with dozens of Korean adoptees who learned that what they’d been told about their origins wasn’t true, and who were ready to share their stories with him.
Finding someone who worked inside South Korea’s adoption system and was willing to speak out was a far more difficult task. South Korean adoption workers are legally forbidden from speaking publicly about their cases.
In the above excerpt from South Korea’s Adoption Reckoning, a documentary from FRONTLINE and the AP premiering Friday, Sept. 20, a former South Korean adoption worker shares her experience in a rare interview.
She worked at one of the country’s private adoption agencies in the early 1980s, during a historic adoption boom promoted by the Korean government that sent children to the West by the hundreds each month. Speaking anonymously, she describes believing in the mission of adoption and wanting to help kids in need.
“I saw so many children in these situations where parents cannot raise their kids,” she says to Kim. “If they had no choice but to grow up in facilities, isn’t it better for them to have parents?”
But the former adoption worker says in the documentary that she developed “a lot of doubts” about the methods used by the agencies.
She describes pressure to process children for adoption at greater speeds: “Children came in. We would work on sending them away, while more were coming in. All I heard was, ‘Work faster, faster and more.’”
She also says she believes the agency put in “zero effort” to verify whether children who were being adopted had truly been abandoned.
“I never saw them trying” to find the parents of a child who was labeled as abandoned, she says. “I don’t think they even thought of that as part of their job.”
In one case, she describes an instance of what appeared to be falsified paperwork: After she flagged that it might be too soon for one child designated as abandoned to be adopted, the same child was brought back to her with a different name on her photo, she says. She didn’t know if the child was eventually adopted abroad.
“Behind the scenes, we questioned: Is this really all for the children?” the former adoption worker says to Kim.
Her account is part of an in-depth AP and FRONTLINE investigation into instances of alleged wrongdoing in an adoption system that saw about 200,000 Koreans adopted to the West over seven decades.
A Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Korea is now investigating hundreds of cases of possible human rights violations associated with past governments’ handling of foreign adoptions.
Directed by Lora Moftah, South Korea’s Adoption Reckoning examines how South Korea’s leaders promoted adoption at a large scale despite decades of warnings about problems, how Western governments turned a blind eye, and how the consequences are still playing out today. The documentary draws on years of reporting, thousands of pages of documents — some of which had never been made public before — and interviews with officials from South Korea and abroad, and more than 80 adoptees who gave powerful firsthand accounts. Over the course of 90 minutes, the film follows Kim and his AP colleague Claire Galofaro as they uncover cases of false identities, fabricated backstories and even stolen children.
EXPLORE MORE: “Who Am I, Then?” Stories from South Korea’s Adoption Reckoning
“What do you do when you find out your origin story is marked with grievous injustice?” one adoptee asks in the documentary.
Adoption agencies have always publicly pointed to the benefits of adoptions as a way of saving vulnerable children. In the documentary, a longtime former executive and spokesperson for one agency — a Korean adoptee herself — says that most adoptions have gone well over the years and denies that there has been systemic, deliberate wrongdoing.
For the full story, watch South Korea’s Adoption Reckoning.
South Korea’s Adoption Reckoning will be available to watch at pbs.org/frontline, at apnews.com and in the PBS App starting Friday, September 20, 2024, at 7/6c. It will premiere on PBS stations (check local listings) and on FRONTLINE’s YouTube channel at 10/9c and will also be available on the PBS Documentaries Prime Video Channel. South Korea’s Adoption Reckoning is a FRONTLINE production with Maxine Productions and Sony Pictures Television – Nonfiction (SPTNF) in association with The Associated Press. The producer and director is Maxine Productions’ Lora Moftah. The AP journalists are Kim Tong-hyung and Claire Galofaro. The senior producer is Nina Chaudry. The executive producers are Mary Robertson for Maxine Productions and Eli Holzman and Aaron Saidman for SPTNF. The editor-in-chief and executive producer of FRONTLINE is Raney Aronson-Rath. The documentary is part of a larger editorial collaboration between FRONTLINE and the AP that includes a multimedia interactive experience featuring additional stories of Korean adoptees as they search for the truth about their origins.
