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Abusive South Korean Facility Exported Children

Associated Press

   BUSAN, SOUTH KOREA - A South Korean facility that kidnapped and abused
   children and the disabled for a generation was also shipping children
   overseas for adoption, part of a massive profit-seeking enterprise that
   thrived by exploiting those trapped within its walls, The Associated
   Press has found.

   The AP, which previously exposed a government cover-up at Brothers Home
   and a level of abuse greater than earlier known, has now found that the
   facility was part of an orphanage pipeline feeding private adoption
   agencies.

   Relying on documents obtained from officials and freedom of information
   requests, the AP uncovered direct evidence that 19 children were
   adopted out of Brothers and sent abroad, as well as indirect evidence
   showing at least 51 more adoptions. The adoptions AP found took place
   between 1979 and 1986.

   There were probably many more adoptions over the three decades Brothers
   operated, but the extent will likely never be known. Most documents
   have been lost, destroyed or withheld by the government and adoption
   agencies.

   The AP found one of the adoptees.

   J. Hwang, who asked to be quoted by the name on her adoption papers
   because of privacy concerns, was 4 in 1982 when documents say police
   officers found her on the street and took her to Brothers, a compound
   in Busan. After her initial adoption fell through, she was sent weeks
   later to another orphanage and then to her new home in North America.

   "One of my main questions is wondering if I was supposed to be (at
   Brothers), or if my parents, my biological parents, are still out there
   looking for me," said Hwang, who didn't know she had been at Brothers.
   "Why me?"

   The previous AP investigation uncovered details about Brothers, where
   from the 1960s to the late 1980s thousands of children and adults that
   authorities deemed "vagrants" were rounded up and kept. Many were
   enslaved, raped and even beaten to death.

   But Brothers was also separating young children for adoption, the AP
   found. Brothers sent these children to adoption agencies, which placed
   them with families in the West.

   During that period, South Korea's ruling military dictatorships
   aggressively institutionalized and exported poor children for profit
   and to clear the streets of those considered socially unacceptable.

   Adoptive parents were unaware of the horrors happening where their
   children once lived or that their payments likely helped fund an
   abusive facility. Biological parents may not have known that their
   children were at Brothers, let alone sent overseas.

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