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Overseas Korean adoption has roots in history, scholar says
By Kim Young-gyo
SEOUL, Aug. 1 (Yonhap) - In 1972, at the age of one, Tobias Hubinette was brought from his birthplace in South Korea to Sweden, where he was raised by a Swedish couple. Today he is one of a handful of scholars researching the long-term causes and consequences of Korea's transnational adoption program.
"As soon as you start to investigate adoption issues in Korea, you will be immediately confronted with other issues, much bigger issues, which need to be solved," said Hubinette in an interview with Yonhap News Agency.
Hubinette received his Ph.D. in Korean studies from Stockholm University in 2005 and is currently working as a researcher at the Multicultural Center in Stockholm.
"When politicians or policymakers start to look at the adoption issue, it becomes too big. It is related to so many other things in Korea. It is not (only) about people they sent away. It would seem so on the surface. The reason they (Korean adoptees) are there is here. It has deep roots historically," he said. "It is a very uncomfortable issue to deal with."
According to the South Korean Ministry of Health and Welfare, 161,202 children were sent overseas for adoption from the end of the Korean War in 1953 to 2006.
A Korean translation of Hubinette's dissertation completed at Stockholm University, titled "Comforting an Orphaned Nation: Representations of International Adoption and Adopted Koreans in Korean Popular Culture," will be published in South Korea next month.
The book is a post-colonial re-examination of how South Korea has represented international adoption and adoptees, he said.
"Adoptees are used as symbols for Korea, which remains very traumatized by (Japan's) colonization, the Korean War, national division and the occupation of the U.S. Army," he said. "Adopted Koreans are symbols of a fractured and fragmented nation."
Hubinette was in Seoul this week speaking at an annual conference for overseas Korean adoptees, where he is helping promote the Seoul-based organization Truth and Reconciliation for the Adoptee Community of Korea (TRACK).
Launched in 2007, TRACK was established as a history and information project to heal the relationship between overseas adoptees and Korean society. TRACK hopes that by revealing the problems in the Korean adoption program, the rights of Korean children and families will be better preserved in the future.
"I am one of the founding members of TRACK. It was based on the ideas in my book, attempting to link adoption with other social issues in South Korea, including gender inequalities and children's rights," Hubinette told Yonhap.
With fiscal sponsorship from a South Korean NGO and advisors from local universities and the South Korean Truth and Reconciliation Commission, TRACK has succeeded in bringing six cases of dubious international adoptions dating from the 1970s-1980s before the Anti-Corruption and Civil Rights Commission of Korea, Hubinette said.
Of the six cases, four involved adopted Koreans who claimed they were sent overseas for adoption without their mothers' consent, which they discovered upon being reunited with their Korean families as adults.
The final report of the civil rights office showed that Korea Social Services confirmed that two were sent by that agency without their mothers' consent.
However, in the same report, the mother and father of two siblings claimed that they did not abandon their children, but the Holt adoption agency reiterated its stance that the children had been abandoned.
The other cases included misrepresentations of children's social histories to adoptive parents and the right of adoptees to access their own personal information, Hubinette said.
In addition to investigating such cases, TRACK also plans to create an archive and library of materials related to transnational adoption from South Korea, said Hubinette.
Last year, the number of South Korean children adopted domestically surpassed overseas adoptions for the first time since the end of the 1960s. South Korea sent 1,388 children, 52.3 percent of the total of 2,652, abroad in 2007.
Critics say that although domestic adoption is preferable to international adoption, separating children from their mothers because of the mother's unmarried status is discriminatory.
ygkim@yna.co.kr
(END)
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