South Korea’s truth commission says it has found more evidence of forced adoptions in the 1980s

SEOUL, South Korea (AP) — South Korean Commission Evidence was found that women were forced to give up their children for adoption abroad after they were born in government-funded facilities where thousands were held and enslaved between the 1960s and 1980s.

The Truth and Reconciliation Commission report released on Monday comes many years after Associated Press revealed adoptions from the largest vagrancy camp, Brothers Home, which sent children abroad as part of a massive, for-profit enterprise that exploited thousands of people trapped in a complex in the port city of Busan. Thousands of children and adults — many of them kidnapped off the streets — were enslaved in such centers and often raped, beaten or killed in the 1970s and 1980s.

The commission was established in December 2020 to investigate human rights abuses related to the country’s previous military government. It previously found that the country’s previous military government responsible for atrocities involved in Brothers. The latest report focuses on four similar facilities in the cities of Seoul and Daegu and the provinces of South Chungcheong and Gyeonggi. Like Brothers, these facilities were run to receive government roundups aimed at beautification of the streets.

Ha Kum Chul, one of the commission’s investigators, said prison records showed at least 20 adoptions were made from Huimangwon in Daegu and Cheonseongwon in South Chungcheong Province in 1985 and 1986. During those two years, South Korea sent more than 17,500 children abroad, the peak of its foreign adoption program.

Ha said the children taken from prisoners at Huimangwon and Cheonseongwon were mostly newborns who were given to two adoption agencies, Holt Children’s Services and the Eastern Social Welfare Society, which placed them with families in the United States, Denmark, Norway and Australia. Most of the babies were given to the agencies on the day of birth or the day after, Ha said, indicating that their adoptions were determined before they were born.

While records at the centers show that some women submitted notes agreeing to give up their children, other records show that women were coerced into doing so, Ha said. A 1985 inmate record from Huimangwon names a 42-year-old female inmate with alleged mental health issues for “causing trouble” by refusing to give up her child. Officials later note that she eventually did so.

“It’s hard to say exactly how many more children were adopted in other years,” Ha said, citing staffing constraints at the commission. In the case of Huimangwon, Ha said, the commission could only look at prisoner records from 1985 and 1986 and still found 14 adoptions. Another six adoptions were linked to prisoners at Cheonseongwon.

At its peak, Huimangwon held about 1,400 prisoners and Cheonseongwon 1,200. This was still fewer than Brothers, which held more than 3,000.

Holt and Eastern did not immediately respond to requests for comment on the commission’s findings.

Through documents obtained from officials, lawmakers or public records requests, the AP found direct evidence in 2019 that 19 children were adopted from Brethren between 1979 and 1986, and indirect evidence suggests at least 51 additional adoptions.

About 200,000 South Koreans have been adopted to the United States, Europe and Australia over the past six decades, creating what is believed to be the world’s largest diaspora of adoptees. Most of the adoptions occurred in the 1970s and 1980s, when South Korea’s then-military leaders focused on economic growth and saw adoption as a tool to reduce the number of people to feed, eliminate the “social problem” of unwed mothers and deepen ties with the democratic West.

The Commission also conducted separate investigation to the cases of 367 adopted Koreans in Europe, the United States and Australia who suspect their biological origins were manipulated to facilitate their adoption. An interim report on the matter is expected to be published this year.

The commission also identified other human rights problems at the four facilities it cited Monday, including Gaengsaengwon in Seoul and Seonghyewon in Gyeonggi Province. The death toll at the facilities was high — the 262 inmates who reported dying at Gaengsaengwon in 1980 accounted for more than 25% of the facility’s population that year, Ha said.

The commission said the bodies of about 120 Cheonseongwon prisoners were sent to a local medical school for anatomical training between 1982 and 1992. Most of the bodies were sent to the school on or after the day the prisoners were pronounced dead, and there is no evidence the facility made any effort to return the bodies to relatives, according to the commission, which did not identify the school.

Huimangwon, Seonghyewon and Cheonseongwon also regularly accepted prisoners transferred from Brothers, suggesting there was a “revolving door” of labor sharing between the facilities that likely increased profits and extended prisoner stays, the commission found.

The vagrancy population in South Korea peaked in the 1980s, when the then-military government stepped up roundups to beautify the streets ahead of the 1986 Asian Games and the 1988 Olympics, held in Seoul. South Korea became a democracy in the late 1980s and has long since ended the practice of rounding up homeless people, disabled people, and children off the streets and locking them up.

The brothers closed in 1988months after a prosecutor exposed its atrocities. Seonghyewon now runs social programs for the homeless in Hwaseong City, while three other facilities have changed their names and the services they provide. None of the facilities immediately released comments following the commission’s report.

“Four detention centers were allowed to continue operating without any public investigations even after 1987,” when Brothers was exposed, said Lee Sang Hoon, one of the commission’s permanent commissioners. “What is significant is that we have comprehensively exposed details of human rights abuses at (other) detention centers across the country that had been covered up for 37 years.”