Thousands of South Korean children were adopted by Australian families under false pretences, according to investigations by both the Associated Press and the ABC. The agency responsible for facilitating adoptions since 1978, Eastern Social Welfare Society (ESWS), allegedly claimed children were orphans when, in reality, those children were received from hospital workers who had been bribed by the agency.
Many of the 3,600 adoptees, now aged in their thirties, had unusually similar case files: born to a single mother, and orphaned. In interviews with the ABC, adult adoptees said their own research had proven their biological parents were alive and had been misled in some cases into believing their child would be adopted by a Korean family. South Korea’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission is now investigating hundreds of adoptee cases and has already confirmed an extensive campaign of deceptive falsification of documents. Australia has not launched an official investigation.
In August, Senator Linda Reynolds called for a broader parliamentary inquiry into intercountry adoption practices, seeking a stop to all international adoptions until more comprehensive safeguards are in place to prevent “trafficking” of orphans.
Quiet migration poses concern over processes
As Melbourne University academics Jay Song and Ryan Gustafsson wrote in 2023, while intercountry is a form of migration, it is not often viewed as such. They wrote in their paper ‘Korean Adoption to Australia as Quiet and Orderly Child Migration’ that “Adoption involves what Anne Collinson (2007) has termed ‘the littlest immigrants’ who, as children, are disempowered and not afforded a voice, and rarely portrayed in the Western media as immigrants. Child/infant migrants remain in the shadow of their adult custodians. They have no agency nor the means to express their consent in the migration and settlement process, which is often considered a private, family affair.”
