| Year(s) | Description |
|---|
| 1870s-1970s | The British Home Children scheme forcibly relocated up to 150,000 children from the UK to other commonwealth countries, often without parents' knowledge, as uncovered by Margaret Humphreys in 1987. The scandal later garnered international public attention with the 2010 film Oranges and Sunshine . |
| 1930s-1970s | Certain Mother and baby Homes in Ireland, where unmarried women were sent to give birth are reported to have forcibly separated babies from their mothers many of whom were adopted by families abroad. [1] [2] |
| 1949-1976 | Forced adoption in the United Kingdom removed children permanently from their parents. |
| 1960s-1980s | Highlighted by the Dutch current affairs show Zembla in 2017, purportedly 11,000 babies were fraudulently sold for adoption in the 1980s from Sri Lanka to western countries, with the use of baby farms to meet the apparent high demand. [3] [4] [5] |
| 1970s-1980s | Under South Korea's military dictatorship in the 1970s and 1980s, white parents in Europe, Australia and the United States adopted 200,000 majority female South Korean children, which is the biggest adoptee diaspora in the world. The European countries included Belgium, Germany, Netherlands, Norway, Denmark. This was a major human rights violation by the military dictatorship as most of the Korean girls were not real orphans and had living biological parents but were given false papers to show that they were orphans and exported to white parents for money. The Korea Welfare Services, Eastern Social Welfare Society, Korea Social Service and Holt Children’s Services were the adoption agencies involved in the trafficking of the girls. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission began investigating the scandal in 2022. [6] The military leaders were linked to the agencies board members and they wanted to establish closer links with the west and decrease South Korea's population. [7] South Korea's Korean Broadcasting System reported on the case of the Korean girl Kim Yu-ri who was taken away from her biological Korean parents and adopted to a French couple where she was raped and molested by the French adopted father. [8] Across Australia, Europe and the United States, the majority female Korean adoptees asked for an investigation from the Truth and Reconciliation Commission into the child trafficking scandal. [9] The Brothers Home was one of the adoption centers that engaged in the trafficking in South Korea and the adoption agencies and South Korean government destroyed tons of documents to hide their activities and gave false identities to the children while selling them. The Brothers Home Facility sold the adoptees to Australia, Europe and North America and they also raped and used the children as slaves themselves. AP investigated adoptions from 1979-1986 at the Brothers Home and interviewed a woman, J. Hwang who was sold to be adopted in North America by the Brothers Home after she was left there by police in 1982 at age 4. Every child earned the Brothers 10 dollars per month paid by the Korea Christian Crusade adoption agency which later became Eastern Social Welfare Society. [10] Denmark was one of the recipients of the Korean adoptees sold by Korea Social Service and Holt Children's Services. [11] [12] Holt Children’s Service was sued by a Korean adoptee in the US for compensation. [13] [14] |
| 1991-1992 | Occasionally termed "The Romanian Baby Bazaar", [15] thousands of Romanian babies were sold under questionable circumstances to adoptive parents in western countries, particularly the United States, after the significant increase in the number of orphaned and abandoned children in the country following the policies of Ceaușescu and his subsequent overthrow in 1989. [16] [17] |
| 1990s-2000s | Orphanages in Hunan, China were reported to have bought babies from traffickers with little recorded information of their provenance, before reselling them to other orphanages or families, with many being adopted internationally. [18] |
| 1990s-2000s | Cambodian children were adopted by families in the United States, only to reportedly find years later that the children were disguised as orphans, their birth families instead having been convinced to sell them, and that officials had been paid illegally by unethical facilitators to obfuscate this. [19] [20] [21] |
