Zineb Khemissi is an Algerian final year PhD researcher at Portsmouth University, School of Area Studies, History, Politics, and Literature. Funded by the Algerian Embassy in London, her research explores the experience of Korean American adoptees’ identity formation processes within the realm of third space theories. She is interested in history, psychology, literature, and international relations.
Transnational and transracial adoptions are an ongoing phenomenon that have not received enough interest from within academia. The marketisation of children from poor to rich countries might not be of importance to all, or it might be another reality ‘hidden in plain sight,’ one in which hundreds of thousands of ‘unwanted’ mixed-race children and ‘war orphans’ are de-rooted, displaced, and transplanted into majority ‘White’ backgrounds. Transnational adoption (TNA) is the inclusion of nationally different children within white households (Barn, 2013). Transracial adoption (TRA) refers to adoptees’ different racial and ethnic backgrounds, foregrounding their race as the main concern in the processes of integration and self-identification.
Saving Children by Selling Them
A global market of adoption was established in the aftermath of the Korean War (1950-1953), to ‘save war orphans’ and ‘pitiful victims’ of that tragedy. Such rhetoric emanated from the American discourse of rescue and was emphasized by the media as a solid justification for child displacement. The US is the leading receiving country, while South Korea has the longest programme for international child adoption, spanning over sixty years (McKee, 2016). One reason for the dominance of the US in international child adoption has been the sense of duty of the ‘Christian Americanists’ (Oh, 2015), i.e. a dogma of religious beliefs used during the post-Cold War period as a political justification to obtain the transnational community’s consent for international adoption.
The constant flow of adopted children from poor to rich countries is a lucrative source of revenue that benefits the institutions and organizations that grant child transfers. ‘The Transnational Adoption Industrial Complex’ (TAIC) (McKee, 2016) goes beyond the valuation of human beings, dehumanising children through commodification under the call of capitalist gain. For example, child trafficking offered a source of revenue for the South Korean government; it brought in an estimated sum of US $15–$20 million in annual income (Korean Ministry of Health and Welfare, 2008, cited by McKee, 2016). This commodification is both dehumanising and victimising children.