Latest news with #KoRoot
Gulf Today
5 hours ago
- Entertainment
- Gulf Today
Soft power: BTS fans rally behind Korean international adoptees
K-pop megaband BTS is back from military service, and their international fandom -- long known for its progressive activism -- is celebrating by rallying behind a cause: adoptees from South Korea. Now Asia's fourth-largest economy and a global cultural powerhouse, the idols' native South Korea remains one of the biggest exporters of adopted babies in the world, having sent more than 140,000 children overseas between 1955 and 1999. The country only recently acknowledged, after years of activism by adult adoptees, that the government was responsible for abuse in some such adoptions of local children, including record fabrication and inadequate consent from birth parents. The septet's fandom, dubbed ARMY, is known for backing causes like Black Lives Matter and ARMY4Palestine, and launched the #ReuniteWithBTS fundraising project last week to support Korean adoptees seeking to reconnect with or learn about their birth families, which can be a painful and legally tricky process. This photo shows a fan of K-pop boy band BTS holding an 'ARMY Bomb' and a picture of BTS members during the annual 'BTS Festa' celebrating the group's debut anniversary at KINTEX exhibition centre in Goyang. K-pop megaband BTS is back from military service, and their international fandom -- long known for its progressive activism -- is celebrating by rallying behind a cause: adoptees from South Korea. AFP Almost all of BTS members have completed South Korea's mandatory military service, required of all men due to the country's military tensions with North Korea. "We are celebrating both the reunion of BTS and ARMY, and BTS members being able to reunite with their own family and friends," the BTS fan group behind the initiative, One In An ARMY, told the media. "Helping international adoptees reunite with their birth country, culture, customs and families seemed like the perfect cause to support during this time." The fans are supporting KoRoot, a Seoul-based organisation that helps Korean adoptees search for their records and birth families and which played a key role in pushing for the government to recognise adoption-related abuses. Fans of K-pop boy band BTS pose for photos as they queue up for the annual 'BTS Festa' celebrating. Peter Moller, KoRoot's co-representative, told the media it was "very touching" that the BTS fans had taken up the cause, even though "they're not even adoptees themselves". For many adoptees, seeing Korean stars in mainstream media has been a way for them to find "comfort, joy, and a sense of pride" in the roots that they were cut off from, KoRoot's leader Kim Do-hyun added. Soft power BTS, who have discussed anti-Asian hate crimes at the White House and spoken candidly about mental health, have long been considered one of the best examples of South Korea's soft power reach. Pastor Kim Do-hyun (left), KoRoot leader who has spent more than 30 years advocating for adoption justice, posing for a photo with Peter Moller, KoRoot's co-representative, after an interview with AFP at KoRoot, a Seoul-based organisation that helps Korean adoptees search for their records and birth families. For years, Korean adoptees -- many of whom were adopted by white families globally -- have advocated for their rights and spoken out about encountering racism in their host countries. Some adoptees, such as the high-profile case of Adam Crapser, were later deported to South Korea as adults because their American parents never secured their US citizenship. Many international adoptees feel their immigration experience has been "fraught", Keung Yoon Bae, a Korean studies professor at Georgia Institute of Technology, told AFP. Some adoptees have found that, like Crapser, their guardians failed to complete the necessary paperwork to make them legal, she said. This is becoming a particular problem under US President Donald Trump, who is pushing a sweeping crackdown on purported illegal immigrants. Bae said it was possible that "'accidentally illegal' adoptee immigrants may fall further through the cracks, and their deeply unfortunate circumstances left unremedied". The whale Reunions between Korean adoptees and their birth families can be emotionally complex, as Kara Bos -- who grew up in the United States -- experienced firsthand when she met her biological father through a landmark paternity lawsuit. A general view of the sign of KoRoot, a Seoul-based organisation that helps Korean adoptees search for their records and birth families, at its house in Seoul. Photos: AFP During their encounter in Seoul in 2020, he refused to remove his hat, sunglasses, or mask, declined to look at her childhood photos and offered no information about her mother. He died around six months later. "The journey of birth family searching is very lonely, difficult, and costly. Many adoptees do not even have the means to return to their birth country let alone fund a family search," Bos, 44, told AFP. To have BTS fans rally around adoptees and provide help with this complex process is "a wonderful opportunity", she said. For Malene Vestergaard, a 42-year-old Korean adoptee and BTS fan in Denmark, the group's song "Whalien 52", which references a whale species whose calls go unheard by others, deeply resonated with her. "I personally sometimes feel like that whale. Being amongst my peers, but they will never be able to truly understand what my adoption has done to me," she told the media. "For me, finding BTS at the same time I started looking for my birth family and the truth about my adoption and my falsified papers, was such a comfort." Vestergaard said the grief woven into her adoption would never go away, but that "BTS and their lyrics have made it easier to reconcile with that truth". Agence France-Presse
France 24
11 hours ago
- Entertainment
- France 24
Soft power: BTS fans rally behind Korean international adoptees
Now Asia's fourth-largest economy and a global cultural powerhouse, the idols' native South Korea remains one of the biggest exporters of adopted babies in the world, having sent more than 140,000 children overseas between 1955 and 1999. The country only recently acknowledged, after years of activism by adult adoptees, that the government was responsible for abuse in some such adoptions of local children, including record fabrication and inadequate consent from birth parents. The septet's fandom, dubbed ARMY, is known for backing causes like Black Lives Matter and ARMY4Palestine, and launched the #ReuniteWithBTS fundraising project last week to support Korean adoptees seeking to reconnect with or learn about their birth families, which can be a painful and legally tricky process. Almost all of BTS members have completed South Korea's mandatory military service, required of all men due to the country's military tensions with North Korea. "We are celebrating both the reunion of BTS and ARMY, and BTS members being able to reunite with their own family and friends," the BTS fan group behind the initiative, One In An ARMY, told AFP. "Helping international adoptees reunite with their birth country, culture, customs and families seemed like the perfect cause to support during this time." The fans are supporting KoRoot, a Seoul-based organisation that helps Korean adoptees search for their records and birth families and which played a key role in pushing for the government to recognise adoption-related abuses. Peter Moller, KoRoot's co-representative, told AFP it was "very touching" that the BTS fans had taken up the cause, even though "they're not even adoptees themselves". For many adoptees, seeing Korean stars in mainstream media has been a way for them to find "comfort, joy, and a sense of pride" in the roots that they were cut off from, KoRoot's leader Kim Do-hyun added. Soft power BTS, who have discussed anti-Asian hate crimes at the White House and spoken candidly about mental health, have long been considered one of the best examples of South Korea's soft power reach. For years, Korean adoptees -- many of whom were adopted by white families globally -- have advocated for their rights and spoken out about encountering racism in their host countries. Some adoptees, such as the high-profile case of Adam Crapser, were later deported to South Korea as adults because their American parents never secured their US citizenship. Many international adoptees feel their immigration experience has been "fraught", Keung Yoon Bae, a Korean studies professor at Georgia Institute of Technology, told AFP. Some adoptees have found that, like Crapser, their guardians failed to complete the necessary paperwork to make them legal, she said. This is becoming a particular problem under US President Donald Trump, who is pushing a sweeping crackdown on purported illegal immigrants. Bae said it was possible that "'accidentally illegal' adoptee immigrants may fall further through the cracks, and their deeply unfortunate circumstances left unremedied". - The whale - Reunions between Korean adoptees and their birth families can be emotionally complex, as Kara Bos -- who grew up in the United States -- experienced firsthand when she met her biological father through a landmark paternity lawsuit. During their encounter in Seoul in 2020, he refused to remove his hat, sunglasses, or mask, declined to look at her childhood photos and offered no information about her mother. He died around six months later. "The journey of birth family searching is very lonely, difficult, and costly. Many adoptees do not even have the means to return to their birth country let alone fund a family search," Bos, 44, told AFP. To have BTS fans rally around adoptees and provide help with this complex process is "a wonderful opportunity", she said. For Malene Vestergaard, a 42-year-old Korean adoptee and BTS fan in Denmark, the group's song "Whalien 52", which references a whale species whose calls go unheard by others, deeply resonated with her. "I personally sometimes feel like that whale. Being amongst my peers, but they will never be able to truly understand what my adoption has done to me," she told AFP. "For me, finding BTS at the same time I started looking for my birth family and the truth about my adoption and my falsified papers, was such a comfort."
Int'l Business Times
11 hours ago
- Entertainment
- Int'l Business Times
Soft Power: BTS Fans Rally Behind Korean International Adoptees
K-pop megaband BTS is back from military service, and their international fandom -- long known for its progressive activism -- is celebrating by rallying behind a cause: adoptees from South Korea. Now Asia's fourth-largest economy and a global cultural powerhouse, the idols' native South Korea remains one of the biggest exporters of adopted babies in the world, having sent more than 140,000 children overseas between 1955 and 1999. The country only recently acknowledged, after years of activism by adult adoptees, that the government was responsible for abuse in some such adoptions of local children, including record fabrication and inadequate consent from birth parents. The septet's fandom, dubbed ARMY, is known for backing causes like Black Lives Matter and ARMY4Palestine, and launched the #ReuniteWithBTS fundraising project last week to support Korean adoptees seeking to reconnect with or learn about their birth families, which can be a painful and legally tricky process. Almost all of BTS members have completed South Korea's mandatory military service, required of all men due to the country's military tensions with North Korea. "We are celebrating both the reunion of BTS and ARMY, and BTS members being able to reunite with their own family and friends," the BTS fan group behind the initiative, One In An ARMY, told AFP. "Helping international adoptees reunite with their birth country, culture, customs and families seemed like the perfect cause to support during this time." The fans are supporting KoRoot, a Seoul-based organisation that helps Korean adoptees search for their records and birth families and which played a key role in pushing for the government to recognise adoption-related abuses. Peter Moller, KoRoot's co-representative, told AFP it was "very touching" that the BTS fans had taken up the cause, even though "they're not even adoptees themselves". For many adoptees, seeing Korean stars in mainstream media has been a way for them to find "comfort, joy, and a sense of pride" in the roots that they were cut off from, KoRoot's leader Kim Do-hyun added. BTS, who have discussed anti-Asian hate crimes at the White House and spoken candidly about mental health, have long been considered one of the best examples of South Korea's soft power reach. For years, Korean adoptees -- many of whom were adopted by white families globally -- have advocated for their rights and spoken out about encountering racism in their host countries. Some adoptees, such as the high-profile case of Adam Crapser, were later deported to South Korea as adults because their American parents never secured their US citizenship. Many international adoptees feel their immigration experience has been "fraught", Keung Yoon Bae, a Korean studies professor at Georgia Institute of Technology, told AFP. Some adoptees have found that, like Crapser, their guardians failed to complete the necessary paperwork to make them legal, she said. This is becoming a particular problem under US President Donald Trump, who is pushing a sweeping crackdown on purported illegal immigrants. Bae said it was possible that "'accidentally illegal' adoptee immigrants may fall further through the cracks, and their deeply unfortunate circumstances left unremedied". Reunions between Korean adoptees and their birth families can be emotionally complex, as Kara Bos -- who grew up in the United States -- experienced firsthand when she met her biological father through a landmark paternity lawsuit. During their encounter in Seoul in 2020, he refused to remove his hat, sunglasses, or mask, declined to look at her childhood photos and offered no information about her mother. He died around six months later. "The journey of birth family searching is very lonely, difficult, and costly. Many adoptees do not even have the means to return to their birth country let alone fund a family search," Bos, 44, told AFP. To have BTS fans rally around adoptees and provide help with this complex process is "a wonderful opportunity", she said. For Malene Vestergaard, a 42-year-old Korean adoptee and BTS fan in Denmark, the group's song "Whalien 52", which references a whale species whose calls go unheard by others, deeply resonated with her. "I personally sometimes feel like that whale. Being amongst my peers, but they will never be able to truly understand what my adoption has done to me," she told AFP. "For me, finding BTS at the same time I started looking for my birth family and the truth about my adoption and my falsified papers, was such a comfort." Vestergaard said the grief woven into her adoption would never go away, but that "BTS and their lyrics have made it easier to reconcile with that truth". BTS fans have launched a fundraising campaign to support South Korean adoptees seeking to reconnect with their birth families AFP BTS have long been considered one of the best examples of South Korea's soft power reach AFP Kim Do-hyun (L), KoRoot leader who has spent more than 30 years advocating for adoption justice, with Peter Moller (R), KoRoot's co-representative AFP
Yahoo
15-05-2025
- General
- Yahoo
Report Exposes the Painful History of International Adoption
Boon Young Han, co-founder of the Danish Korean Rights Group, stands for a portrait at the offices of KoRoot, an advocacy organization for international adoptees from South Korea, on Thursday, March 27, 2025 in Seoul, South Korea. (Photo by Jintak Han/The Washington Post via Getty Images) Credit - Jintak Han—TheIn March, South Korea's Truth and Reconciliation Committee (TRC) released its report on the country's international adoption system. After a three-year investigation, the committee found evidence that, among other widespread abuses, adoption agencies fabricated documents, misrepresented children as orphans available to be adopted, and sent children overseas without the consent of their biological families. Concluding that the human rights of adoptees and birth parents were violated, the TRC has recommended that the Korean government issue an official apology. For many, these findings are shocking but not surprising. Adoptees who have searched for information about their birth families and academics who have studied international adoption have long known of cases in which one child was substituted at the last minute for another—or of birth mothers who were coerced or tricked into relinquishing their children. Adoptees have located birth parents they were told were dead. The agencies that arranged their adoptions have lied to adoptees and withheld information. Activists in Korea, many of whom are international adoptees who returned as adults, have been fighting to draw attention to these cases for years. South Korea has been winding down the practice of international adoption, but the practice continues there and around the world, even if at a much slower pace than in previous decades. But even if it stopped tomorrow, the system that has moved hundreds of thousands of children around the world was built on the foundations of Korean adoption, which have been revealed as deeply problematic. International adoption is not as old as some might think. Americans had adopted internationally on an ad hoc basis and in small numbers in the years before and after World War II, but systematic international adoption is rooted in the aftermath of the Korean War (1950-1953) when Americans began adopting children from South Korea. Originally, these adoptions were used as a temporary effort to remove mixed-race 'GI babies' born to Korean women and fathered by foreign men, presumed to be American military personnel. Observers quickly concluded that these children had no future in Korea for three reasons: they were racially mixed in a society that thought of itself as racially pure; they were the children of women who were assumed to be sex workers; and they were fatherless in a highly patriarchal society, and in which citizenship flowed through fathers, not mothers. How Online Adoption Ads Prey on Pregnant People In the United States, which had historically excluded Asian immigrants, Korean-white children's racial mixture made them imaginable as family members for the white parents who adopted most of them. So did Americans' understanding of these children as coming from a Christian, democratic South Korea. In the context of the Cold War, these transracial, international adoptions were powerful symbols of Americans' new commitment to antiracism, despite the persistence of racist policies in immigration, housing, and employment. Korean children first came to the United States under a series of temporary refugee laws, but Americans' demand for foreign children was strong enough that Congress made international adoption a permanent part of immigration law in 1961. South Korea, which had facilitated international adoption since the 1950s then enacted a law to make it easier for foreigners to adopt. With these legal mechanisms in place, the Korean adoption system grew. Beginning in the 1960s, it encompassed a wider range of children: the children of the poor, children with disabilities, and then, by the 1980s, the children of single mothers. South Korea also began sending children to a widening array of receiving countries in Europe, as well as Canada and Australia. Its adoption agencies' streamlined policies and processes made the country the so-called "Cadillac of international adoption," offering speed, professionalism, and healthy babies. South Korea remained the number one source of children for adoption until the 1990s, long after the Korean War had ended. The international adoption system that began in Korea served as a template as the practice spread to countries around the world, including Vietnam, Colombia, and Guatemala in the 1970s and 1980s, and Russia and China in the 1990s. In the early 2000s, Christian evangelicals in the U.S. embraced the cause of rescuing orphans, and adopted children from Ethiopia, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and Haiti. Although parents in the West adopted for a range of humanitarian and religious reasons, they also looked abroad because they faced a shortage of adoptable babies at home. This complex combination of altruism and consumerism accompanied international adoption as it spread and developed into what one consultant to UNICEF called 'a demand-driven business.' Beyond these market dynamics, governments and child welfare agencies took up the logic behind international adoption that had been established in Korea: that it was better for a child to grow up in a wealthy western country than to live in a poor home in the culture and country of their birth, and that governments should focus on facilitating international adoption rather than on keeping families together. As adoption agencies entered countries struggling with poverty, instability, or natural disaster, they brought with them the system created in Korea. Orphanages supported by western sponsorship money were disproportionately wealthier than the communities around them. It also made them more attractive to poor parents who wanted their children to have access to those resources or perhaps just needed some childcare while they worked. Once children were in an orphanage, parents could be convinced – or coerced – into relinquishing them for adoption. And once westerners began to demand 'orphans' from a country, the incentives for adoption agencies to provide them only increased, leading to more coercion and fraud. Over the past several decades, international adoption has served the best interest of the Korean government. Rather than investing in social welfare programs or supporting poor families and single mothers, the Korean government sent its children overseas. Its orphanages, hospitals, maternity homes, adoption agencies, and police received donations and gratitude payments from foreign adopters. International adoption also allowed Koreans to maintain carefully enforced ideas of bloodline purity, which hindered domestic adoption, and Confucian patriarchy, which made single motherhood an impossibility and which produced more children for international adoption. Americans have adopted internationally for decades without having to truly confront the global inequalities that made such a system possible, and which continue to sustain it. They have been able to choose from a variety of countries, comparing factors like cost, ease, type of child available, and processing time. Although they may have adopted with the best of intentions, they benefited from a system that exploited the weak and vulnerable in other countries. As the problems of international adoption have become more widely known, more adoptive parents have grappled with the realization that some of the children they adopted were never orphans at all, or never properly relinquished. My White Adoptive Parents Struggled to See Me as Korean. Would They Have Understood My Anger at the Rise in Anti-Asian Violence? The corruption that comes from the unavoidable market dynamics of international adoption have followed it wherever it has gone. Recognizing this, countries from Guatemala to China have stopped sending children abroad, and Denmark has stopped receiving them. Sweden ended international adoption from South Korea in 2023 in response to the kinds of allegations the TRC confirmed. The United States should investigate its role in the global international adoption system it pioneered in South Korea and has supported ever since. At a minimum, the U.S. should give citizenship to the thousands of adoptees who were never naturalized by their parents, and who are now at risk for deportation. Congress enacted the Child Citizenship Act of 2000 to ensure that international adoptees acquired U.S, citizenship more or less automatically, but the law fails to cover an unknown number of adoptees (somewhere between 18,000 to 75,000) who were already adults when the law passed. The Adoptee Citizenship Act, which is intended to fix this oversight, has been introduced twice in Congress to no effect. As for South Korea, the TRC's report addresses just 56 of the 367 cases that international adoptees have brought to its attention. The TRC has now been suspended and it is unclear whether the investigation will continue. But anywhere from 150,000 to 200,000 Korean children have been sent overseas for adoption since the 1950s, and they deserve answers about their origins. Meaningful redress demands continued efforts to uncover the truths beneath the international adoption industry—no matter how painful they may be. Arissa H. Oh is Associate Professor in the History Department at Boston College and the author of To Save the Children of Korea: The Cold War Origins of International Adoption. Made by History takes readers beyond the headlines with articles written and edited by professional historians. Learn more about Made by History at TIME here. Opinions expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of TIME editors. Write to Made by History at madebyhistory@
