Did Australia know? South Korean adoptees demand answers over global scandal

Labor has promised to investigate concerns about the Australia-Korea adoption program if it is re-elected to government, as calls grow from adoptees for answers about whether authorities knew of the legal and ethical issues now plaguing the Seoul agency that facilitated thousands of adoptions to Australia.

The pledge comes after a landmark South Korean inquiry last month found systemic fraud and abuse in the country’s adoption program, including falsified orphan registrations, leading to a profit-driven “mass exportation of children” with minimal procedural oversight.

Jessica Walton (fourth from left) at a gathering of the AUSKRG in Melbourne to campaign for the South Korean inquiry to finish its work and for Australia to investigate its own intercountry adoption practices.

Labor’s inquiry would be likely to be an internal investigation by the Department of Social Services, which is responsible for intercountry adoption, rather than a parliamentary inquiry that would be conducted at arm’s length and have the ability to hold public hearings.

“We recognise the distress this has caused those affected. If re-elected, Labor will ask the Department of Social Services to investigate the allegations and report to the minister,” a government spokesman said in a statement.

Any inquiry would have to examine Australia’s relationship with its partner agency, Eastern Social Welfare Society, based in Seoul. Eastern is one of four privately run agencies under investigation for human rights violations by South Korea’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission. It has facilitated about 3600 adoptions to Australia since 1978 as well as thousands to the United States.

Jessica Walton, a committee member of the Australia United States Korean Rights Group, which has made submissions to the South Korean inquiry, said many adoptees were seeking answers.

“The AUSKRG believes the findings warrant an Australian investigation into what Australian authorities knew about how Eastern facilitated adoptions, and how the Korean state processed these,” Walton said.

In its submission to the commission, the group said Eastern’s records showed its adoptions peaked between 1980 and 1988, when about five children per day were being sent to the US or Australia. During this period, Australia’s relationship with Eastern was not governed by The Hague Convention standards on adoption, which Australia only ratified in 1998.

Over the past fortnight, a group of Australian-Korean adoptees called KADS Connect has also formed with the goal of pushing for a national inquiry into intercountry adoptions, beginning with South Korea.

Australian-Korean adoptees also met in Sydney recently to add their voice to calls for a national inquiry into the intercountry adoption program. KADS co-founder Samara Kim on the far right.Credit: Jessica Hromas

Samara Kim, a founding member of the group, welcomed Labor’s commitment to an investigation but raised concerns that a federal departmental inquiry would be too narrow in scope and lack the transparency to probe issues across the broader intercountry adoption framework.

“Given the vulnerabilities and violations in the Korean program – which has long been considered the gold standard of intercountry adoption – it raises serious concerns about adoptions from all countries,” said Kim, a PhD candidate researching Australian intercountry adoption.

“That’s why we’re calling for a fully independent transparent national inquiry to uncover the full picture.”

As reported by this masthead, former NSW government social worker Josie McSkimming raised internal concerns about Eastern’s practices, and the vetting processes for adoptive parents undertaken by the state’s adoption branch, when she was an employee there in the 1980s.

She also disclosed how she and her husband, who was not a department employee, were tasked with escorting two Korean toddlers on a flight home from Seoul to their new lives in Australia following a 1984 work trip to meet Eastern representatives.

Liberal senator Linda Reynolds, who has been following the commission’s work, has also called for a wide-reaching parliamentary inquiry after the federal election to “review and report on the situation across all Australian jurisdictions”.

“This is to ensure that we protect the rights and best interests of adoptees, and to align Australia’s intercountry adoption practices with international best practice,” she said in a statement.

However, Reynolds’ Senate term expires in June, potentially leaving adoptees without someone in the federal parliament to champion the issue.

There are 10 Australian cases among the 367 complaints being investigated by the South Korean commission, which have been lodged by adoptees from 11 countries. In a set of initial findings released in March, the commission confirmed that five of the Australian cases had been “truth confirmed” as having human rights violations, though it provided no further details on the cases. The AUSKRG is concerned that the commission won’t finish its findings before its mandate expires in May.

Separately, this masthead has spoken to numerous adoptees whose files from Eastern have documentation listing them as orphans with no known parents, while other documents recorded the names of their birth parents.

“The two things contradict each other, and that has been a very common experience for a lot of adoptees,” said Walton, an American-Korean adoptee who has lived in Australia for more than 20 years and has written a PhD on South Korea’s adoptees’ experiences.

She said stories had circulated in the Australian-Korean adoption community for years about suspicious irregularities, even contradictions, in their official adoption files from Eastern.

Eastern has not responded to multiple requests for comment about allegations of falsified documentation and malpractice in its operations.

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