Barriers To Birth Family Search In Korea and In The Western Countries of Adoption.
Barriers To Birth Family Search In Korea and In The Western Countries of Adoption.
Adoptees fresh out of the “adoptee fog” are often in for a shock when they come to the point of wanting to do a birth family search. Many, though not all adoptees, are in for what can often be a very rough ride.
This is not to discourage Adoptees from undertaking a birth family search. It is however, worth recognizing the odds an Adoptee is up against when attempting to find her or his biological roots in Korea. It helps to know what you will be up against, so that you can be better prepared when you face the inevitable roadblcoks and hardships of birth family search. We strongly recommend you connect to the local and global Korean Adoptee community, and lean on your friends and family members for support if possible. Self care is important when facing the uphill odds of attempting to find biological family in Korea.
With this said, we have also heard many stories of Korean Adoptees simply waltzing up to their Korean Adoption Agencies, and almost immediately being put into reunion with biological family. This seems much more likely to happen for those born / adopted in the 1980s or later, but literally one never knows how a story will play out in Korea.
Below we will discuss some common barriers to birth family search in Korea and in the Western countries of adoption. Though this discussion is certainly not exhaustive, it hopefully gives some guidance for those new to the birth family search process so that they know what they may be in for.
Chief among the barriers to birth family search for Korean Adoptees is often Adoptees themselves. The majority of Korean Adoptees have spent most of their lives surrounded by white dominated culture and society, in which the experience of constant “othering” has been the norm. As a result, it often takes years for many Korean Adoptees to acknowledge and eventually embrace their identities as Transracial Korean Adoptees, and to come to the point where they want to undertake a birth family search. This is not at all to blame the Adoptee - this is simply to acknowledge the common experience which many Adoptees face when considering a birth family search, and which also prevents many Korean Adoptees from ever doing a birth family search in the first place.
Orphanization is a major part of the overall gaslighting which the vast majority of Korean Adoptee experience growing up. Most Korean Adoptees have paperwork which says that they were “abandoned” with “unknown birth parents”. What many Korean Adoptees don’t realize is that they were Orphanized. Orphanization is the process by which the Korean government made Korean children legally adoptable to the West by omitting any known birth parent information from Adoptees’ English facing paperwork. Yet secretly, the Korean Adoption Agencies kept “shadow files” about Adoptees which sometimes, though not always, contain birth parent information.
For KSS (Korea Social Service) Adoptees ONLY, there is now a way to request and receive a particularly important document from their shadow file. That process is documented in the “Illustrated Step By Step Guide” here. Please do NOT contact KSS if KSS was NOT your Korean Adoption Agency, as this only wastes severely limited resources.
However, for Korean Adoptees from the other major Korean Adoption Agencies (Holt; KWS (Korea Welfare Society) - previously SWS (Social Welfare Society) / CPS (Child Placement Service) / Daehan Placement Service / 대한양연회 (Daehan means Korea); ESWS / ECWS (Eastern Social Welfare Society / Eastern Child Welfare Society) this path to receiving their shadow file does not officially exist.
More about the Orphanization of many Korean Adoptees: Part of the deep gaslighting of Korean Adoptees is the Orphanization which was a routine part of the Korean and US / European / Canadian / Australian (Western) adoption process. Many Korean Adoptees grew up believing falsely that they were “abandoned” and had “unknown birth parents”. Most Korean Adoptees have some level of falsification in their adoption files - depending on the case, a Korean Adoptee may not have their real Korean name, birthdate, city of birth, or birth parent information listed in their documents. Most egregiously, many Korean Adoptees had living birth family whose information was routinely omitted from or falsified in their adoption paperwork. Countless Korean Adoptees were supposedly “abandoned” with “unknown birth parents”. However, many Korean Adoptees have come to realize that this information was falsified, and many of those who are in reunion with their Korean birth families have discovered that they were not simply abandoned at a police station, but were rather either relinquished directly by birth family to orphanages and adoption agencies, or most egregiously, were kidnapped from the streets or acquired by unscrupulous maternity, birth clinic, or hospital staff who told the birth parents that the child had died, then sold the child to Korean Adoption Agencies. Countless unwed birth mothers were pressured into relinquishing their children by family members, doctors, single unwed mothers homes, adoption agencies, etc. There are many instances we know of where birth fathers relinquished children without the consent or knowledge of the birth mother. Sometimes other family members (such as grandparents / aunts / uncles) relinquished children without the consent of the birth parent/s. This is not to say that children were never truly legitimately relinquished or abandoned in Korea - certainly many were. Unfortunately the truth about an Adoptee’s relinquishment is often difficult to know for certain even for those Adoptees who are in reunion with their birth families. Koreans are world champion secret keepers and it’s not uncommon for one birth parent to withhold information about the other birth parent from the Adoptee.
Often, Korean Adoptees don’t know what their Korean and / or Western (US / European / Canadian / Australian) Adoption Agencies are and don’t know that starting a birth family search is possible. Many Korean Adoptees either don’t have or don’t have access to their original adoption paperwork for a variety of reasons: their adoptive parents have lost or hidden the information, the Adoptee her or himself has lost the information, or the Adoptee lives far from the adoptive parents who have the original information and can’t or won’t retrieve it. US Adoptees can file a FREE FOIA request for their US immigr. file, which often contains an abundance of adoption documents since Korean Adoptees were adopted across international borders. Please note however that requesting a FOIA does not initiate any kind of birth family search. In order to request a birth family search, a Korean Adoptee must contact their Korean Adoption Agency. However, if a Korean Adoptee does not know what their Korean Adoption Agency was, then this is a barrier to effective birth family search.
Some things to know if you do NOT know your Korean Adoption Agency:
You can find a list of all 4 major Korean Adoption Agencies and their corresponding Western Adoption Agencies here:*Note: If you do not know your Korean Adoption Agency, but do know your Western Adoption Agency, then you can reach out to your Western Adoption Agency (if still open) to find out what your Korean Adoption Agency was.
If you were adopted to the US (are American), then you could have been adopted through any of the 4 major Korean Adoption Agencies designated to process international adoption by the Korean government since 1976:
HOLT Korea (not to be confused with Holt International, which is the Western Holt Adoption Agency)
Eastern Social Welfare Society (ESWS) - formerly Eastern Child Welfare Society (ECWS)
Social Welfare Society (SWS) / now Korea Welfare Society (KWS)
Korea Social Service (KSS)
If you were adopted to Sweden (are Swedish), your Korean Adoption Agency is most likely Social Welfare Society / SWS (now KWS / Korea Welfare Society).
If you were adopted to the Netherlands (are Dutch) then your Korean Adoption Agency was most like Korea Social Service (KSS).
If you were adopted to Denmark (are Danish), then your Korean Adoption Agency was either Holt KOREA or Korea Social Service (KSS). These were the only two major Korean Adoption Agencies which adopted to Denmark.'
If you were adopted to Australia (are Australian), your Korean Adoption Agency was most likely Eastern Social Welfare Society (ESWS) - formerly Eastern Child Welfare Society (ECWS).
*You may also have had a private adoption, in which case, there would be no Korean Adoption Agency to contact. In such cases, the best places to start are the orphanages or other locations mentioned in your paperwork.Once you know what your Korean Adoption Agency was, and you are ready to begin a birth family search through your relevant Korean Adoption Agency, you can find the contact information of your Korean Adoption Agency on the Korean Adoptee Starter Guide .
The Korean government does not want to spend the time, money, or resources on effective birth family search for Adoptees. The evidence of this is clear in the Korean government’s lack of support for NCRC (the National Center for the Rights of the Child), whose Overseas Adoption office has (as of September 2023) just 2 birth family search workers to serve the needs of thousands of Korean Adoptees around the world. As a result, it can take months for NCRC to respond to an Adoptee’s request. KAS (Korea Adoption Service) / NCRC has not addressed its well known website issues in years. The only thing they have updated is to make their sites harder to use by removing the ability to search the sites via Google (since around September 2023). It is up to the Korean government to fund NCRC, and the Korean government makes sure NOT to adequately fund this weakest of Korean government institutions, thus creating a deliberate bottleneck for birth family search requests by Adoptees.
Yet in the meantime, the Korean government currently stages elaborate “dog and pony” shows where they invite Korean Adoptees from around the world to visit Korea for a week of cultural festivities. These sometimes elaborately produced events likely share the same motivation as the old birth family search shows featuring Korean Adoptees which appeared on Korean television back in the 1980s and 1990s: apparently the Korean government directed the Korean television stations to create these shows in response to complaints by many Korean birth parents, whose children had gone “missing”, only to end up adopted overseas. These shows were effectively PR (public relations) stunts designed to appease the angry complaints by Korean birth parents, and were designed to show the Korean public that the Korean government was doing something about the issue (which they themselves created). In the same vein, another PR stunt pulled by the Korean government during Covid in 2020 is that the Korean government distributed free face masks to Korean Adoptees around the globe. Many Korean Adoptees scoffed at this massive effort, noting that if only the Korean government could invest the same amount of energy into making our adoption files available to us, we might then be able to get somewhere in our birth family searches. Korea is an advanced nation which can now use drones to write messages in the sky. Yet KAS / NCRC still have yet to fix their years’ long known website issues, and appear to have deliberately made their sites even harder to use in 2023.
The Korean government, which so efficiently moved up to 1% of its population out of the country through international adoption in the 1980s, has NOT created an effective way for Korean birth parents to find their lost, stolen, or relinquished children.
Western governments and adoption agencies are no better. US adoption agencies are known to charge Adoptees high fees in order to initiate a birth family search, and often these Western agencies provide little return for the money.
The costs associated with traveling to and from Korea, along with the attendant loss of time at work, with family, etc. is a major barrier for many Adoptees who seek to find their birth families in Korea. Often only those with significant financial means are able to undertake birth family search in Korea.
Korean adoption records are not digitized / online for Adoptees to access. Due to the lack of digitization of Korean Adoption records (at least, those which Korean Adoptees can access), Korean Adoptees often have to go in person to Korea in order to conduct a birth family search. As Korean Adoptees, we are aware that the otherwise hyper-modern Korean government does this deliberately so as to make yet more money off of our sale and distribution around the world.
The language and cultural barrier means that Korean Adoptees must find not just a good translator, but also a good translator who understands the needs of Adoptees and birth family members. There is no clear path for doing so, and as such, it is up to Adoptees to scramble to find access to limited resources during a usually short stay in Korea.
The Korean Adoption agencies routinely hide information from Adoptees. The Korean Adoption Agencies routinely hide behind “birth parent privacy” to cover a multitude of their past sins. A Korean Adoptee has no idea if their birth parent info is being hidden for legitimate birth parent privacy reasons, or because their case was a case of adoption trafficking. It is not unusual for a Korean Adoptee to go through her or his entire life believing that they were “abandoned”, when in fact, they had living birth relatives in Korea all along.
The prevailing notion of adoption as universally happy and beneficial is something which Adoptees constantly have to battle, both within themselves, and against the public at large. This alone can gaslight an Adoptee into never searching for her or his biological roots in Korea - because after all, aren’t they so “lucky” to have grown up in the West? What more could possibly be desired by an Adoptee?
Not enough Adoptees take all possible DNA tests. There are many reasons why Korean Adoptees don’t take DNA tests, or don’t take enough DNA tests:
So many Korean Adoptees are often “in the fog” for so many years, and either don’t think to take a DNA test, or are afraid to do so.
DNA testing is confusing.
There are many different DNA tests which have different databases.
Korean Adoptees have legitimate concerns about privacy issues associated with DNA testing.
Because of these reasons and more, not enough Korean Adoptees are taking all possible DNA tests.
But DNA testing is so important for Korean Adoptees, at least in part because we know that some Korean Adoption Agencies many times separated siblings and twins.
We believe but cannot prove that KSS may have been routinely separating twins from the 1970s forward, particularly twins adopted to the US. To date, we do not know of ANY confirmed KSS twins adopted to the US between 1979 - 2012. We cannot more strongly urge Korean Adoptees to take ALL possible DNA tests.Koreans living in Korea don’t usually take DNA tests. Koreans, a people obsessed with bloodline, do not usually take DNA tests. This is because most Koreans have family Hojuks or Jokbos, which unlike the “Orphan Hojuks” with which Korean Adoptees are familiar, connect the individual to the family back over hundreds of years of time. Simply put, they don’t see the need to take a DNA test.
23 and Me does not ship directly to Korea. 23 and Me, the US commercial DNA test which has the most Korean DNA in its database, does not ship directly to Korea. Therefore any native Korean wanting to take a 23 and Me test will find it very difficult to do so. Please note, however, that to our knowledge, FTDNA, MyHeritage, and Ancestry CAN be shipped to Korea. Please note that Ancestry is the largest US commercial DNA database overall, and has the most White / Black DNA in its database. For this reason it’s worthwhile for any Hapa (mixed race) Korean Adoptees to take both Ancestry and 23 and Me. However, it should be noted that in order for a Korean Adoptee to give themselves the highest possibility of finding blood relatives, that s/he should take ALL possible DNA tests. Please see the DNA Testing page for more information.
Birth Family Search Is Hard, But Not Impossible.
We know that countless thousands of brave Korean Adoptees have undertaken birth family searches in Korea, since we first started returning to Korea decades ago. We commend those who have undertaken the sometimes brutal challenges faced when attempting to find biological roots in Korea. There will be countless thousands who attempt birth family search in Korean in the future.
If you are a Korean Adoptee from ANY Korean Adoption Agency adopted to ANY Western country, and wish to undertake a birth family search, we recommend starting here:
Korean Adoptee Starter Guide
If you are a Korea Social Service (KSS) Adoptee ONLY, please see this important page: