Many Korean children were not registered at birth by their birth parents. Regardless of how they were acquired by the agencies, the children were classified as “abandoned.” With this abandoned status, the adoption agencies were able to create new family registries (“orphan registry”) which listed no known parents. This occurred even when the identity of the parents was available.

What does this mean?

The agencies used the false abandoned status procedure so that they could quickly and efficiently produce the “orphan registry” which was necessary to progress the adoption process administratively. While carelessly disregarding known information about the birth parents, the agencies permanently obscured identifying information from the adoptee, making it harder or impossible for them to locate their families later in life.

Before a child was put forward for adoption, their guardian at the orphanage or adoption agency was required to make an attempt to find their birth parents. The agency made an application to the local court who would put up a notice on an exterior bulletin board. The notice would have identifying details of the child, how and when they were found etc. in case someone knows the family might come forward. 

However, agencies were applying for this mandatory notice at court houses that were very far from the place where the child was found, making it highly unlikely someone who knew them would see the notice. Some notices also contained very little helpful information.

What does this mean?

The agencies were not making a genuine effort to find the family or known persons of these children. While they were doing what was legally required, they found loopholes during the process making it near impossible for any family to find out information on their missing child.

The TRC found cases where a child was lost by family inadvertently, not with the intention of giving the child up for adoption. 

Birth families would discover while searching for their children, that they had been taken and adopted overseas and the agencies would not help them to get their children back.

What does this mean?

The agencies were moving the children out of the country very quickly without adequate checks as to whether they had family looking for them. In cases where it became known that the child was not available for adoption, the agencies protected the Western adoptive families and the illicit adoption, rather than assisting the birth family who had lost their child.

Sometimes a child that was to be adopted would become no longer available for adoption. Some reasons were their parents came to reclaim them, death or serious illness. As the adoption agency had already invested time and money in preparing that child for overseas adoption, rather than cancelling the adoption, they would replace that child with another child, but using the original child’s identity.

What does this mean?

The primary reason for this was to not waste the time already invested in the child and to go through the complicated process of issuing a refund to the adoptive parents. The catastrophic effect of this laziness and greed is that the child who was actually sent lost their entire identity and any possible information that would connect them to their birth family and any chance of finding them.

Korean adoption laws provided basic criteria to approve a foreign couple for adoption (financial capacity, good moral character and not using the child as a slave). Western agencies would send the parents’ assessment report to the Korean agency to decide if the parents met the legal criteria. The criteria were so basic, so this wouldn’t have been hard. However, the TRC found that a disproportionate number of adoptive couples were being approved within a very short time frame, which would indicate that very little scrutiny of the adoptive parents was taking place at all. 

What does this mean?

There was no genuine care from the Korean adoption agencies about the suitability of the people who would be the families of vulnerable and often traumatised children, travelling long distances to unknown places to live permanently with unknown people. The approval process was just a formality. The best interests of the child was the very last concern of the adoption agencies.