 | This article appears to be slanted towards recent events.(December 2023) |
The following is an incomplete list of notable reports of international adoption scandals, including instances of child harvesting, child laundering, child selling, or child trafficking between countries:
| 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 . |
| 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. [1] [2] [3] |
| 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. [4] 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. [5] 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. [6] 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. [7] 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. [8] Denmark was one of the recipients of the Korean adoptees sold by Korea Social Service and Holt Children's Services. [9] [10] Holt Children’s Service was sued by a Korean adoptee in the US for compensation. [11] [12] |
| 1991-1992 | Occasionally termed "The Romanian Baby Bazaar", [13] 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. [14] [15] |
| 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. |
| 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] |
| 2000s | Three Chinese children were removed from families who had violated family-planning regulations, and then sold by officials for international adoption inappropriately. |
| 2000s | Canadian adoptive families raise concerns about the reliability of documentation and their welfare when adopting children from Ethiopian orphanages, following several instances where families of supposed orphans are found alive, or the health and age of the children are not consistent with their documentation. [22] [23] [24] |
| 2004 | New Zealand current affairs show 1News investigated cases in Samoa where locals placed their children for adoption to families in the United States without realising or understanding that the process was permanent and not just for their schooling. [25] [26] [27] |
| 2005-2008 | 16 individuals are charged in Vietnam for allegedly soliciting children from poor families and selling them to foreign adoptive families. A total of 266 babies were reportedly sent for international adoption over the course of 3 years. [28] |
| 2007 | Members of the French charity L'Arche de Zoé are charged by the government of Chad after attempting to fly over 100 children out of the country, for adoption by French families. The members claimed the children were orphans from Darfur, Sudan, but it was later revealed that some children were from Chad, with no evidence that they had been orphaned. [29] [30] |
| 2007 | Guatemalan officials take custody of dozens of children in a foster home following accusations that they were stolen are obtained through coercion, with many children having already been adopted by families in the United States. [31] [32] [33] |
| 2007 | A Haitian centre is forced to return 47 children awaiting international adoption in their care back to their original homes, after misleading families with payment for their children and then keeping them in "inhumane conditions" for months or years. [34] |
| 2010 | A US mother attempts to repatriate her adopted 7-year old back to his home country of Russia, by sending him alone on a one-way flight to Moscow with a note claiming she was unable to parent him. [35] [36] This event amongst several others precipitates Russian officials to call for a suspension of US adoptions. [37] |
| 2010 | New Life Children's Refuge case: ten Baptist missionaries are arrested and charged with kidnapping 22 children in Haiti in the aftermath of the 2010 earthquake, allegedly attempting to move them to an orphanage in the Dominican Republic. It later became clear that at least some of the children were not orphaned at all, and the missionaries did not have authorisation to act as they did. [38] [39] |
| 2019 | United States Maricopa County Assessor Paul Peterson is sentenced for smuggling pregnant women from the Marshall Islands to at least 3 different US states as part of an illegal adoption scheme. [40] [41] |
| 2020 | Ugandan officials are sanctioned and 3 women are charged in the US over their alleged roles in an adoption scheme that defrauded adoptive families and bribed officials in order to procure children for adoption from Uganda and Poland. [42] [43] |
Adoption is a process whereby a person assumes the parenting of another, usually a child, from that person's biological or legal parent or parents. Legal adoptions permanently transfer all rights and responsibilities, along with filiation, from the biological parents to the adoptive parents.
The international adoption of South Korean children started around 1953 as a measure to take care of the large number of mixed children that became orphaned during and after the Korean War. It quickly evolved to include orphaned Korean children. Religious organizations in the United States, Australia, and many Western European nations slowly developed the apparatus that sustained international adoption as a socially integrated system.
Holt International Children's Services (HICS) is a faith-based humanitarian organization and adoption agency based in Eugene, Oregon, United States, known for international adoption and child welfare. The nonprofit works in thirteen countries, including: Cambodia, China, Colombia, Ethiopia, Haiti, India, Mongolia, Philippines, South Korea, Thailand, Uganda, Vietnam, and the United States. This work includes a range of services for children and families including efforts in nutrition, education, family strengthening, orphan care, foster care, family reunification, and child sponsorship. The organization's stated mission is to seek a world where every child has a loving and secure home.
International adoption is a type of adoption in which an individual or couple residing in one country becomes the legal and permanent parent(s) of a child who is a national of another country. In general, prospective adoptive parents must meet the legal adoption requirements of their country of residence and those of the country whose nationality the child holds.
In the United States, adoption is the process of creating a legal parent–child relationship between a child and a parent who was not automatically recognized as the child's parent at birth.
Interracial adoption refers to the act of placing a child of one racial or ethnic group with adoptive parents of another racial or ethnic group.
David Mark Smolin is a professor of law at Cumberland School of Law in Birmingham, Alabama where he is the Harwell G. Davis Chair in Constitutional Law, director for The Center for Children, Law, and Ethics, former director of the Center for Biotechnology, Law, and Ethics, and faculty advisor for the Law, Science and Technology Society.
Child laundering is a tactic used in illegal or fraudulent international adoptions. It may involve child trafficking and child acquisition through payment, deceit or force. The children may then be held in sham orphanages while formal adoption processes are used to send them to adoptive parents in another country.
The Hague Convention on Protection of Children and Co-operation in Respect of Intercountry Adoption is an international convention dealing with international adoption, child laundering, and child trafficking in an effort to protect those involved from the corruption, abuses, and exploitation which sometimes accompanies international adoption. The convention has been considered crucial because it provides a formal international and intergovernmental recognition of intercountry adoption to ensure that adoptions under the convention will generally be recognized and given effect in other party countries.
Lotte Corporation is a South Korean multinational conglomerate corporation, and the fifth-largest chaebol in South Korea. Lotte was founded on June 28, 1948, by Korean businessman Shin Kyuk-ho in Tokyo. Shin expanded Lotte to his ancestral country, South Korea, with the establishment of Lotte Confectionery in Seoul on April 3, 1967.
Adoption in Australia deals with the adoption process in the various parts of Australia, whereby a person assumes or acquires the permanent, legal status of parenthood in relation to a child under the age of 18 in place of the child's birth or biological parents. Australia classifies adoptions as local adoptions, and intercountry adoptions. Known child adoptions are a form of local adoptions.
Child-selling is the practice of selling children, usually by parents, legal guardians, or subsequent custodians, including adoption agencies, orphanages and Mother and Baby Homes. Where the subsequent relationship with the child is essentially non-exploitative, it is usually the case that purpose of child-selling was to permit adoption.
The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to adoption:
Seoul Searching is a 2016 South Korean comedy-drama film written and directed by Benson Lee and starring Justin Chon, Jessika Van, Cha In-pyo and Teo Yoo.
Kim Yo Jong is a North Korean politician and diplomat, and sister of Kim Jong Un. She is the Deputy Department Director of the Publicity and Information Department of the Workers' Party of Korea (WPK). Since September 2021, she has been a member of State Affairs Commission of North Korea.
Oh Sang-jin is a South Korean former news anchor, television personality, and actor.
The Brothers' Home was an internment camp located in Busan, South Korea during the 1970s and 1980s. During its operation, it held 20 factories and thousands of people who were rounded up off of the street, the homeless some of whom were children, in addition to college students who were protesting the regime. Only 10% of internees were actually homeless. The camp was home to some of the worst human rights abuses in South Korea during the period and has been nicknamed "Korea's Auschwitz" by various media outlets.
Martha Mendoza is an Associated Press journalist whose reporting has helped free over 2,000 enslaved fishermen and prompted action by the U.S. Congress and the White House.
There have been several high-profile cases of deportation of Korean adoptees from the United States. Prior to the passage of the Child Citizenship Act of 2000, the adoptive parents of adoptees had to file for their child to naturalize before the age of 16. Many parents were unaware of this requirement, assuming that their adopted children automatically derived citizenship from them, and therefore did not apply. The Child Citizenship Act sought to remedy this issue by extending citizenship to all international adoptees who were under 18 at the time that the bill was passed, but did not apply retroactively. This left those adopted by American families prior to 1983 vulnerable to deportations.
Malligyong-1 is a type of North Korean reconnaissance satellite. It is North Korea's first spy satellite. It is in a sun-synchronous orbit at about 500 kilometres (310 mi) altitude, and will provide a global optical imaging surveillance capability of several countries. The resolution of the imaging capability is not generally known.