Adoptions from South Korea to Denmark in the 1970s and 1980s were “characterized by systematic illegal activity” in the Asian country, according to a Danish report.
COPENHAGEN, Denmark — A Danish report on Thursday said adoptions from South Korea to Denmark in the 1970s and 1980s were “characterized by systematic illegal activities” in the Asian country.
The report states that these violations “allowed children to change information about their backgrounds and adopt children without their biological parents’ knowledge.”
The report was the latest in a dark chapter in international adoption. In 2013, the Seoul government began requiring foreign adoptions to go through a family court. The move ended a decades-long policy of allowing private agencies to make child abandonment, custody transfer and relocation decisions.
The Danish Appeals Board, which oversees international adoptions, said there was an “unfortunate incentive structure in which large sums of money were exchanged between Danish and Korean organizations” surrounding adoptions.
The 129-page report, published by an agency under the Danish Ministry of Social Affairs, focused on the period from January 1, 1970 to December 31, 1989.
A total of 7,220 adoptions were made from South Korea to Denmark over the past 20 years.
The report is based on the results of 60 investigations from three private Danish agencies dealing with adoptions from South Korea: Dan Adopt, AC Bornejaerp and Terre des Hommes. The first two of his agencies merged to become Danish International Adoption, and the third agency he closed Adoption in 1999.
The agency wrote that two of the companies, DanAdopt and AC Bornejaelp, were “aware of this practice” of changing information about children’s backgrounds.
The report was prepared in response to a number of issues raised by Danish Korean rights groups. In 2022, rights group representative Peter Mueller also submitted a document to Seoul’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission.
“Danish organizations continued to express a desire to maintain a high number of adoptions of children of certain ages and health conditions from South Korea,” the report said. The Korean agencies that sent the children to Denmark were the Holt Child Welfare Corporation and the Korea Social Welfare Corporation.
Han Bunyon of the Danish activist group told The Associated Press that an independent investigation is still needed, as such an investigation “hopes that those responsible will finally be held accountable for their actions.” He said that.
From the late 1970s to the mid-1980s, Korean institutions actively recruited newborns and infants from hospitals and orphanages, often in exchange for money, and maternity facilities where single mothers were pressured to give up their babies. operated. Adoption workers traveled to industrial and low-income neighborhoods, looking for struggling families to persuade them to give up their children.
On January 16, Denmark’s only overseas adoption agency, DIA, decided to promote international adoptions after the government agency raised concerns about fabricated documents and procedures that obscure the biological origins of children abroad. It was announced that it would be “downsized.” In recent years, DIA has brokered adoptions in the Philippines, India, South Africa, Thailand, Taiwan, and the Czech Republic.
Adopters in Europe, the United States and Australia have long warned of fraud involving infants who are mistakenly registered as abandoned orphans despite having living relatives in their home countries.
___ Tonghyung Kim in Seoul contributed to this report.