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DANIEL:

From Schwartz Media, I’m Daniel James, this is 7am.

Thousands of children from South Korea have been adopted by Australian families over decades.

In many cases, these children were raised to believe they were orphans – and their adoptive families believed they were doing something loving and selfless by giving them a home.

But a much more sinister truth has been laid bare by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Korea.

Today associate editor for The Saturday Paper, Martin McKenzie-Murray, on the trafficking of fake orphans, and whether Australia is finally ready to confront its part in the trade.

It’s Wednesday, May 21.

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DANIEL:

Marty, I want to start by asking about a reunion that happened in Seoul back in 2010. What happened in that room?

MARTY:

I have to be a little careful about divulging the details because it's a very personal and sensitive issue to this person. This person's now a young woman, and they were a South Korean adoptee from the now-scandalised Eastern Social Welfare Society, was the name of the adoption agency. And like many of these adoptees, this woman had grown up in Australian suburbia with an entirely invented biography. Those inventions were several, but probably the most profound one was that she grew up believing that she was an orphan. And so the reunion is very far from a fairy tale, because for one, the young woman was reuniting with a mother she thought was dead. And the mother, on her side, she had no idea that her daughter had been adopted out to Australia; she was denied that bit of information, was lied to about it. So you have this meeting which is filled with extended family, and neither party has mutual language, so it's brokered haltingly by a translator, which is insufficient to get across the various confusions and this sudden kind of disclosure and unpackaging of all these lies that they had believed for so many years. And so then they went their separate ways. And in fact, they have not seen each other since. And it's not a story that we would typically, I think, concentrate or emphasise upon - in the media when we talk about adoption reunions, we like those stories of the research and the happy outcome.

DANIEL:

So how did it come to be that her entire background was fabricated as an adoptee?

MARTY:

So from a few years ago, there was a petition in South Korea to submit ‘Eastern Social Welfare Society’, the adoption agency, to investigation. For decades, South Korea has been the largest exporter of children via inter-country adoption. That peaked in the middle of the 1980s. And the Eastern Adoption Agency was the largest in South Korea. And stories started coming out as people were encountering discrepancies in their own stories; you know, their adoption documents might comprise two pages, really scant stuff, and it turns out upon scrutiny, filled with lies and fabrications. So there were these discrepancies that the children now adults wanted to unravel, and in doing so unravelled really quite sickening, repugnant abuses by this adoption agency.

Audio excerpt – TRT World Reporter:

“South Korea's Truth and Reconciliation Commission has announced the preliminary results of a years-long investigation into overseas adoption involving an estimated 150,000 babies over decades.”

MARTY:

In 2022, South Korea's Truth and Reconciliation Commission turned its attention to these adoption malpractices. It found, in a lot of cases, adopted children were declared as orphans when in fact they were simply the children of mothers that had been coerced into relinquishing their child. It had found that the agency had facilitated huge numbers of adoptions with very little procedural oversight. And it found that a lot of information of these children had been lost either through negligence or lost cynically. Or that the biographical data of these adopted children had been entirely falsified or fabricated.

DANIEL:

Can you tell me about the story of Samara Kim, another South Korean adoptee that you spoke to?

MARTY:

Yeah, she was another adoptee of the Eastern Adoption Agency. She's also an academic that specialises in inter-country adoption practices. She's authored several papers on this and is currently a PhD candidate in it. She grew up believing she was an orphan. She possessed a scant biography as contained in her adoption documents. But beyond this, the little biography she had was in itself fabricated. She wasn't an orphan. And in trying to get answers, she said when she realised that so much of what she knew of her past, and the conditions of her adoption were invented through gross negligence or even criminality, she now suffers this existential crisis. I think she described it as like a jigsaw puzzle. Which was never complete anyway, but the few pieces she had for it, she suddenly lost.

DANIEL:

And Samara is doing her PhD on international adoption as you said. So what does she have to say about what's driving this?

MARTY:

Several things were driving it and sort of depends on which decade we're looking at.

Audio excerpt – TRT World Reporter:

“South Korean adoption began with mixed race and other orphans following the 1950-53 Korean War, in part to curry favour with allies, especially the U.S.”

MARTY:

South Korea isn't unique in this, but after the Korean War, there was an increase in biracial babies born of U.S. Soldiers, for instance There was a kind of a cultural suspicion of such babies. It invited embarrassment upon families. Because it was seen to be kind of diluting kinship, diluting strong Korean bloodlines. And I felt like there was an appropriate analogy with the Irish Magdalene laundries. So in South Korea, similarly to Ireland - we experienced it here in Australia as well, to a lesser extent - was unwed mothers or single mothers being ostracised, being considered sinful or spiritually corrupt, and embarrassed or shamed or coerced into relinquishing their children. And those children that were taken from their mothers, these children are now given, often falsified documentation, and entirely invented pasts.

Audio excerpt – Truth and Reconciliation spokesperson:

“So the fundamental cause of such a variety of occurrences is that the state has turned a blind eye to the continuous occurrence of these illegal and unlawful acts over the decades and has not implemented any mechanism to control them.”

MARTY:

As time moved on, inter-country adoption simply became incredibly profitable.

I was hesitant last week speaking to all these adoptees to use this kind of bloodless phrase of supply and demand, but there are two sides of inter-country adoption. There's the sending country and the receiving country. And there have to be kind of cultural and political conditions to receive children from other cultures. So, Samara’s contention is that what drove a lot of Western adoption and Australian adoption was a sense of kind of cultural superiority. And she felt it laundered, explicitly or often implicitly, a certain form of colonialism. And I think it's still true today that the word adoption is sort of haloed by ideas of benevolence.

Audio excerpt – TRT World Reporter:

“Advocates say human rights abuses also need to be addressed by the countries to which Korean adoptees were sent.”

MARTY:

So, a sense of Western superiority, and even kind of saviourism, played a part in a process that was, in fact, in some cases not adoption, but really human trafficking.

DANIEL:

After the break – how the Australian government’s promise to investigate falls short.

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DANIEL:

Marty, Australia has adopted a lot of children from South Korea, which is currently confronting the fraud and abuse that has been part of that industry there. But you mentioned that this goes beyond South Korea. So tell us about some of the other countries Australians have adopted from.

MARTY:

Plenty of countries. One woman I spoke to, Kimbra. She was part of what was called the ‘Julie Chu’ ring. Now, the Julie Chu ring truly astonished Taiwan at the time that it was revealed. Which is in the early 1980s. Julie Chu was, she presented herself as a lawyer, which was another sort of fraudulence of hers. She was a legal secretary. In 1982, her home was raided after the exposure of what was essentially a criminal syndicate dedicated to the trafficking of babies. But it involved doctors and midwives and lawyers, each acting corruptly to procure babies and there are stories today still suggesting that babies were outright kidnapped. From crowded markets, taken from their prams. In other cases, corrupted doctors and midwives coercing mothers into relinquishing their children, not telling them where they were going, falsifying birth certificates. It’s believed there was at least 26 so-called Julie Chu babies sent to Australia in the early 1980s, most of them to South Australia. And Kimbra was one of this cohort. Julie Chu was sentenced initially to a life sentence. It was reduced to about six years. But it begs the question, what cultural and bureaucratic conditions existed in Australia? That an outright flagrantly kind of wicked criminal syndicate could be mistaken for a legitimate adoption agency. And that question for the adoptees I was speaking to this week hasn't been adequately answered.

DANIEL:

So, has Australia begun to confront or reconcile with its role in all of this as a player in the overseas adoption industry.

MARTY:

So just prior to the Federal election. The Albanese government made a promise that it would begin an inquiry into Australia's processing and reception of South Korean adoptees should it be re-elected. But the problem here, according to every adoptee that I spoke to, is that the profundity of what happened, and the profundity of Australian negligence to deal with outright criminal syndicates, or countries that aren't signatories, for instance, to the Hague Convention of 1993, that helps govern inter-country adoption - the problem with undertaking an inquiry like this by the department itself is that there's an obvious conflicted interest there. The other issue would be that if it limited its attentions to South Korea you'd be losing a lot. I've just given you the Julie Chu example, for instance, but there are many others from different countries.

DANIEL:

So it's fair to say that adoptees are not confident in terms of whether the inquiry is serious and will lead to the outcomes that they desire.

MARTY:

Oh, yes, definitely. Another adoptee I spoke to was Lynelle Long. Who in the late 90s established the Inter-Country Adoptee Voices Group. Her personal story was that she was brought from Vietnam. In 1973. Taken from a war zone when she was five months old and flown to Melbourne. Straight into the care of abusive parents. Her adoption was brokered by the Lutheran Church and the Australian government. And she suffered many, many, many years of abuse. This was ventilated in the Royal Commission to Institutionalise Child Sexual Abuse; her father was convicted for his abuse. And last year she in fact received a letter from the immigration minister, which expressed sorrow and accepted that there was not a robust system in place when Lynelle was adopted.

So Lanell's point is... Well, first it's a very large one. She believes that mostly inter-country adoption is unconscionable. And that there are rarely conditions that would justify the removal of the child from biological parents and their country of origin and that culture. Lynelle said for a long year she described it as the adoption fog. And what she meant by the adoption fog was her own internalisation, of what she described as the myths of benevolence. So that adoption was only ever a good thing and the adoptee should only ever be infinitely grateful for it. Um, and this was internalised sort of so deeply, she says that Any deviation from a feeling of gratitude? She could feel shame about. Now, keep in mind that that kind of deep sense of internalised gratitude extended to abusive parents. And so she said it took her some time to kind of liberate herself from that sense of gratitude. And to understand that adoption, in this case, was not benevolent at all. One, it facilitated provision of a very vulnerable child into the hands of abusive parents. And two, it spoke to a profound. Negligence and bureaucratic failure. On the behalf of the Australian Government.

DANIEL:

And finally, Marty, when you look at the regulation and oversight around adoption – has it gotten any better over time? Do we know that?

MARTY:

In some ways, Lynelle Long would sort of passionately say not, however. For instance, Australia is still dealing with South Korea. In adoptions, the only thing that's been removed or, shall I say, corrected in that sense is that we're not dealing with specifically The Eastern Adoption Agency. Taiwan, we still deal with, nor are Taiwan signatories to this 93 Hague Convention. And I think, you know, you've got political and potential legislative reform, but there's something else, which I think is what I might call cultural reform, which is that the way media contemplate these issues is particularly narrow. I think we quite cynically pursue quote unquote ‘feel-good stories’ to the exclusion of deeper and more profound stories that are messier and more complicated but probably truer to the experience. And something else that I was discussing with Lynelle is whether or not you know, in all of these cases, there is the persistence of the word ‘adoption’ to describe them, when a more appropriate description in most of these cases is human trafficking. And I wondered what would happen, popularly or politically, if some time ago we used the more appropriate description for it.

DANIEL:

Marty, thank you for your reporting on this, really appreciate it.

MARTY:

Thanks, mate.

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DANIEL:

Also in the news…

The Nationals will not be forming a Coalition with the Liberal Party, ending a 79-year partnership.

Nationals leader David Littleproud made the announcement after discussions with the new Liberal leader Sussan Ley over the past week, citing nuclear energy as a major point of disagreement for the two parties.

And

Foreign Minister Penny Wong is visiting three pacific island nations in her first standalone trip since the election.

Senator Wong is visiting Vanuatu, Tonga and Fiji, with the UN Climate Change Conference COP31 near the top of her agenda.

Australia is hoping to co-host the event next year, with Adelaide proposed as the host city.

I’m Daniel James, 7am will be back tomorrow.

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