• More than 170,000 South Korean children were adopted by Western families in the turbulent post-war period – nearly 9,000 a year at times in the 1980s
• Many were labelled orphans, despite their birth parents still being alive, and say their documents were falsified, making them question their identity

It was late spring and Uma Feed had just dropped her son off at a kindergarten in Oslo when her phone rang unexpectedly, bringing news she’d been searching for her whole life: the true identities of her birth parents.

Adopted as a baby from South Korea in 1983, Feed grew up in Norway being told she’d been abandoned – a story she refused to believe but could only disprove in May this year, when at age 40 she was finally reconnected with her biological mother thanks to DNA testing.

A long letter and video message followed, revealing that Um Sul-yung – the name given on Feed’s adoption documents – was actually given up for adoption by her grandparents without the consent of her mother, who was hospitalised with tuberculosis at the time.

“Every evening, my mum and my older brother had gone out to look for me. They were just wandering the streets,” she said.

Adopted children experience many of the same issues in education as children in care, notes Kimberly Clarke

Ten cheers for Floella Benjamin, Civitas and the cross-party group of peers behind the report Breaking the Care Ceiling (Young people leave care, then are hung out to dry. Why don’t we help them get to university instead?, 11 September). However, I would urge them – and anyone who is considering the issues involved – to expand their work to explicitly include adopted children.

There is no doubt that children who are adopted have better outcomes than those who spend a lot of their young lives in care, but it is a widely believed myth that adoption magically erases or reverses the trauma that children have been through, and often continue to experience as they try to make sense of their lives.

Adopted children are 20 times more likely to be excluded from school than their peers. This in itself is evidence that adopted children experience many of the same issues in education as children in care, but often there is an expectation from professionals (educators and others) that they don’t deserve different treatment.
Kimberly Clarke
Exeter

WASHINGTON (AP) — "Hola, mamá.”

What seems like an unremarkable greeting between mother and son was in this case anything but.

Forty-two years ago, hospital workers took María Angélica González’s son from her arms right after birth and later told her he had died. Now, she was meeting him face-to-face at her home in Valdivia, Chile.

“I love you very much,” Jimmy Lippert Thyden told his mother in Spanish as they embraced amid tears.

“It knocked the wind out of me. ... I was suffocated by the gravity of this moment,” Thyden told The Associated Press in a video call after the reunion. “How do you hug someone in a way that makes up for 42 years of hugs?”

Safeguarding search for origins from illicit post-adoption practices

Stop pointing fingers at the government and take joint responsibility for the success of youth care. Tom van Yperen makes this call to the youth field. On Thursday, November 16, the educationalist and expert on the quality of the youth system will deliver the twelfth edition of the annual Mulock Houwer lecture at the Netherlands Youth Institute.

Innovation in youth care has been necessary for decades. At the end of the last century, Mulock Houwer made proposals that are still relevant today. Such as his plea to work more on an outpatient basis with families and to phase out residential care. Why is it that we are still struggling with the same problems more than 50 years later? According to Van Yperen, things often go wrong as soon as a good idea is converted into legislation. The parties involved tinker with the content so much that in the end there is little left of it.

Critical, but hopeful

Can youth care actually change? Van Yperen is looking for an answer to that question. He is critical, but hopeful. Van Yperen draws hope from the unique collaboration for the Reform Agenda. Let this be the starting point for shared responsibility, he argues.

His criticism is aimed at the policy focus in the sector. Not the reform itself, but the major social youth issues should be central. Such as the increasing use of youth care and the decline in the mental well-being of young people. These require broad, social solutions.

Under the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet, thousands of Chilean children were adopted abroad without the consent of their biological families. A sprawling affair, which has occupied Chilean justice since 2018.

SantiagoSantiago(Chile).– It is a long tremor that is shaking Chile, a country that has been accustomed to earthquakes for almost ten years. The first shock dates back to April 19, 2014, when the independent media Ciper revealed the illicit adoptions of several children born in the 1980s. The facts reported in the article occurred in Santiago. In several hospitals in the capital, doctors declared dead around ten newborns, in reality given up for adoption, through a priest.

Abstract

Background

Illegal adoption, which mainly includes child trafficking and informal adoption, has long been a prevalent social issue in China. However, the processes and patterns of illegal adoption are not well understood due to the scarcity of data.

Objective

The findings are expected to provide insightful clues for the government and the public to better understand the two categories of illegal adoption.

Joint statement on illegal intercountry adoptions

Between the 1960s and the 1990s, more than twenty thousand Chilean children were adopted and taken abroad by French, Italian, American, Belgian and even Canadian families. Adoption encouraged by the dictatorship of General Pinochet. But years later, voices began to be raised in Chile: several thousand biological mothers had in fact never agreed to have their babies given up for adoption. RFI went to meet these women in Chile, but also children adopted in France, who are looking for their origins.

From our correspondent in Chile,

1,200 kilometers south of Santiago, on the island of Chiloé, Ruth Huisca puts wood in the stove which warms the main room, in the middle of the southern winter. This domestic worker, aged around fifty, welcomes us in a red house with the typical architecture of the island, with its facade covered in wooden shingles.

In the mid-1980s, Ruth lived and worked in Osorno, in the south of the country. She became pregnant by her boyfriend when she was 17, and he was 16. He moved to another town, and Ruth gave birth to a baby girl alone at the Osorno hospital. But she doesn't dare return to her home in the countryside. “  At the time, I couldn't have come back to my grandparents with a baby. They would have thrown me out, they would have given me a beating. So I was afraid to tell them I was pregnant. And I looked for a pension for my daughter, I entrusted her to a lady I trusted.  »

Although the commission’s chairperson acknowledged the probability of the incident and the state’s responsibility, he noted it should be resolved through diplomatic measures

“There does appear to have been some likelihood of harm in the Hà My village incident. It does appear that the state bears some responsibility in connection with that issue. But there is also the potential for restitution for that harm to be received through the courts rather than the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. We will move to dismiss [this matter] as not corresponding to the scope of our commission’s investigation subjects.”

As soon as the final statement had been made by Kim Kwang-dong, chairperson of South Korea’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, a member nominated by the Democratic Party raised an objection.