‘South Korea’s Adoption Reckoning’ Reporters & Director Spotlight How Western Demand Played a Role in the Korean Adoption Boom
AP reporter Kim Tong-hyung interviews a Korean adoptee for the FRONTLINE & AP documentary "South Korea's Adoption Reckoning."
Around 200,000 children were sent abroad from South Korea to be adopted in foreign countries over the course of seven decades. South Korea’s Adoption Reckoning, FRONTLINE’s latest documentary in collaboration with The Associated Press, examines allegations of fraud and falsifications during the country’s historic adoption boom and traces how Western demand for babies helped shape the Korean adoption system. The investigation found some adoptees in search of answers discovered false identities, fabricated backstories or even that they were taken without their parents’ consent.
A Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Korea is investigating hundreds of cases of possible human rights violations connected to past governments’ handling of foreign adoptions.
In a conversation with FRONTLINE, AP reporters Kim Tong-hyung and Claire Galofaro and director Lora Moftah talk about their reporting and filmmaking process, how their investigative revelations challenge some Korean and Western assumptions about international adoption, and how the practice is now facing a reckoning as the adoptees search for their roots.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Tong-hyung, can you tell me how and when this investigation started for you?
Kim: I started developing a reporting interest in the adoption issue about nine years ago. I began an investigative piece on a facility called Brothers Home, which operated from the ‘60s to ‘80s. It was where people deemed as vagrants, including homeless people, disabled people or even just children wandering around got grabbed from the streets and were confined in this huge facility in the South Korean city of Busan, where they were enslaved. When I began interviewing the inmates, some of them said there was an understanding that the youngest inmates were being sent abroad for adoptions.
At this time, I really didn’t have any critical awareness of the Korean adoption system. As I worked on the story on Brothers Home, I began to focus a bit of my efforts on adoption. I was shocked to see that in the mid-‘80s, we were sending 7,000, 8,000, nearly 9,000 children a year. I lived through the ‘80s as a kid, when we as Koreans were beginning to gain pride that we were now introducing ourselves to the richer part of the world. Our economy was rising. I don’t recall streets overflowing with orphans or babies in baskets. So I was astonished at those stats. Who were all these kids? And how were we able to do that so efficiently?
When you talk with experts or the government, you first encounter the established narratives about Korean adoption. The dominant narrative was that there were some bad adoptions, but these are isolated incidents, and that this system was based on goodwill to find needy children decent homes. But that at some point, the competition between the adoption agencies got out of hand and we sent so many children in the ‘80s. I didn’t feel that those explanations were sufficient. So my focus gravitated toward how the government built this system, what drove this huge movement of children abroad, and to identify the deeper forces that were at work.
Tong-hyung, you’ve been reporting on this for years. When you and Claire started reporting for the documentary, what were some of the big questions you were trying to answer?
Kim: We wanted to send a clear and concise message on how this adoption program grew and lasted for over seven decades.
I’ve been writing about Korean adoption for years. But Western demand is a very important part because Korea has been catering its adoption system to U.S. laws and Western demand for decades.
Galofaro: The main investigative question we wanted to look at was: How did Korean adoptions go from being this small-scale humanitarian effort to a cultural phenomenon?
Lora, how did you first learn about this project and what made you think it would make for a good documentary?
Moftah: It was about just over a year ago FRONTLINE had spoken to the AP about this investigation. They sent me a summary and some documents about it. Immediately what stood out was that you have this really complex investigation into something that took place over decades. And to have the level of reporting that Tong-hyung had already brought to it was just incredibly exciting. But the other thing is that Tong-hyung had spent years cultivating relationships with not just sources inside the adoption world, but the adoptees themselves and these incredibly compelling human stories with trajectories that are just full of twists and turns that are absolutely heart dropping. Right away, that was incredibly compelling to me as a filmmaker.
We began to conceive of “How do we translate this into a documentary? Is it built around one person’s story?” Immediately it became clear that it couldn’t be, because there is no one story that could really encapsulate this whole program. We were able to help trace how the program developed as a result of the incredible generosity of these adoptees opening up about the most sensitive details of their lives, their family, their origins, their very identity.
What’s great about working with reporters like Tong-hyung and Claire is the respect and care they bring for the people that we are interviewing, and their sensitivities and boundaries — not just in how we render their stories, but even how we deal with the documents they’ve shared with us. Those were all considerations we were constantly talking about throughout, with the AP, with our team at FRONTLINE.
In your investigation, you found that over the years social workers from abroad and South Korean government officials raised concerns about South Korea’s foreign adoption practices. Why did South Korea and Western countries receiving adoptees allow adoptions to continue despite those concerns? What finally prompted them to examine the system and take action?
Galofaro: In terms of Western governments, I think that everyone saw this as a way that everybody benefited.
It’s hard to overstate how desperate Western families were for children. We found letters from the 1950s and 60s where people were writing to government officials, to their congressional representatives, literally begging for help finding kids. At that time, so many more people wanted kids than kids were available. So I think the government was facing intense pressure from families who wanted kids and wanted to figure out how to get them.
Kim: In Korean government records, you see the government was concerned about social welfare spending when their priority was investing in industrial policies for economic development and building up the military. So adoption was an easy way to remove the children that they didn’t believe were worthy of social welfare spending. It started out as the mixed race children from relationships between South Korean women and Western soldiers. It then became Korean children from poor families or babies of unwed mothers.
In the late ‘80s, Korea made a transition to democracy. That meant a lot of the practices under past military governments could no longer escape scrutiny. Another important factor was the 1988 Seoul Olympics. Korea really invested in those Olympics as its coming out event to the world, but was alarmed by how much attention its adoption program was getting. So it began to rein in the child gathering activities of the adoption agencies. Adoptions suddenly plummeted from an average of around 6,000 a year in the ‘80s to around 2,000 a year for most of the ‘90s.
But at the same time, it’s important to note that the government never really acknowledged its responsibility of creating a system that critics say carelessly and unnecessarily separated so many children from their families.
These are very intimate stories that delve into the adoptees’ personal lives and their search for their biological parents and identity. Can you talk about how you built a trusting relationship with them and how you were able to convince them to share their stories on camera?
Kim: My AP colleague Tim Sullivan always says, “If you’re nice to people, they’re going to talk to you.” As simple as that sounds, that has been true. A lot of the adoptees we spoke to lived their entire lives looking for their roots, and they have been stonewalled at every step. So they’re sharing with you a very deep and painful story. You’re grateful people are sharing, and if you’re willing to listen and investigate their stories in a serious way, people will open up to you.
Moftah: In terms of the process of filming these stories, we were lucky in that many of the folks we spoke to already had relationships that had built-in trust as a result of the connections Tong-hyung had made. But still, it’s a big ask to have a camera pointed in your face as you’re talking about the most traumatic moments of your life. And when you’re making a documentary, it’s rarely just a one-and-done interview.
Beyond the filming, we’re also vetting stories. We’re asking people to provide their adoption files and photographs of their childhood. So the commitment goes beyond just when the camera is present.
We, in our process, really over-communicate what we’re doing and why, so that nothing comes as a surprise. We really believe in giving our participants agency because they’ve already been disempowered in so many ways as a result of how the system has played out for them. So it was really important that we weren’t reinforcing or perpetuating some of those exact dynamics in this process, which can unfortunately sometimes happen in the process of putting things on screen.
Interactive: “Who Am I, Then?” Stories from South Korea’s Adoption Reckoning
You’ve collectively spoken with dozens of adoptees. What are some of the issues that they now face? What kind of resolutions are they hoping for?
Kim: Adoptees I talked to — including those who submitted their cases to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission — a lot of them are angry at the South Korean government and the adoption agencies. They’re hoping that an acknowledgment of government responsibility by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission would give them tangible grounds to pursue legal suits against the government or their agencies. Other adoptees are hopeful that the commission’s investigation would require the agencies to open their records to investigators and that would somehow improve their chances of finding their real biological information and hopefully reunite with their families. There are also adoptees trying to raise awareness about what they went through.
Galofaro: I think the other major issue facing this group of adoptees is that the system wasn’t designed for them. It wasn’t designed with the idea that they would one day want to know who they were. Documents were created to ease adoption, not to create a pathway for them to one day reconnect with their roots. And so when they go back to Korea, they have a really hard time.
Why do you think this reckoning over the legacy of South Korea’s adoption policies is happening now? Has there been a shift in attitude towards adoptions both in South Korea and in Western countries?
Galofaro: I think what’s happening in South Korea is important globally. There is a wider movement to really reconsider whether international adoption is a good thing that we should continue, and I think that movement has taken root in Europe very recently. A number of European countries have launched investigations. In some places, they’ve just shut down international adoptions.
People have been questioning their adoptions for a long time. At first, they were dismissed as one-offs and as aberrations. Over time, they found each other and organized. And then they became a critical mass.
Kim: I think the overall image of adoptions in Korea, including those heartwarming reunions or the media’s focus on Korean adoptees who enjoyed social success in the West — that continues. But I think the awareness of the problems is beginning to increase. Right now, we are at the moment where I think complaints and criticism from adoptees who have been stonewalled in their search for their biological information are reaching a level where it’s becoming very hard for the government and adoption agencies to ignore.
Is there anything else anyone would like to add?
Galofaro: It’s important to note that there are a lot of people who defend international adoption. International adoption has changed dramatically since all this happened. After the Hague Convention [that established international standards for adoptions between countries], the number of international adoptions plummeted. Every Western country is receiving far fewer kids, and those kids are different. They’re now older. A lot of them have special needs. And people who advocate for adoption say, “What would become of these children if we weren’t willing to let them be adopted to the West?” So there is a real, emotional debate about the future of international adoption happening now.
Kim: A lot of adoptees, even those who are frustrated by their birth searches, are grateful about how their lives turned out in the West. Their emotions are complicated. But our focus was never just to draw a simplistic picture of adoptions based on a collection of bad cases we found.
