Kim Tak-un was once 4 years previous when he was once followed via a Swedish circle of relatives in 1974. Firstly from South Korea, Tak-un had lived along with his unmarried father, a labourer who moved regularly for paintings. Someday in the summertime of 1974, whilst staying along with his aunt, Tak-un wandered outdoor and disappeared.
Native police thought to be him deserted and referred him to an adoption company, which organized his adoption to Sweden inside 5 months. When his father realised his son was once lacking, he searched all over the place, most effective to find – too past due – that Tak-un had already been despatched in a foreign country. Devastated, he demanded Tak-un’s go back. When the adoption company failed to reply, he went public with the tale.
In March 2025, South Korea’s Reality and Reconciliation Fee launched preliminary findings from its investigation into the rustic’s 72-year-old world adoption programme. The entire file is predicted in the following few weeks because the investigation is now finished.
In keeping with greater than 360 instances submitted via Korean adoptees from 11 nations, the fee exposed standard human rights violations, together with falsified paperwork, loss of parental consent, and instances of kid switching – shaking up adoptees and their households.
Because the finish of the Korean Battle (1950–1953), South Korea has despatched over 200,000 youngsters in another country, changing into the arena’s biggest nation for adoption, even because it grew into a sophisticated economic system.
Current research have proven that world adoption from South Korea started as a reaction to the massive selection of mixed-heritage youngsters born to Korean moms and US squaddies all the way through the conflict.
It’s estimated that 1000’s of such youngsters have been born, and South Korea’s first president, Syngman Rhee, ordered their in a foreign country placement at the grounds that they have been “unfit” for a country imagined as ethnically homogeneous.
Alternatively, world adoption didn’t finish as soon as this perceived “emergency” was once over. From the mid-Sixties onward, it expanded to incorporate youngsters from different prone backgrounds, together with the ones suffering from poverty, circle of relatives breakdown, and out-of-wedlock births. This, and the position of world adoption, is explored in my upcoming guide.
This was once carefully tied to the insurance policies pursued via South Korea’s army regimes. Crucial determine was once Park Chung Hee, an army total who got here to energy via a 1961 coup and dominated till his assassination in 1979.
His regime prioritised fast financial enlargement, relegating social welfare to the bottom precedence. Childcare was once handled as a person, now not a state, accountability. As I indicate in my previous analysis, public methods to classify and take care of youngsters – whether or not deserted, misplaced, or runaway – have been extraordinarily restricted, and government in large part positioned the load on folks to retrieve their separated youngsters. That is most probably why, after most effective cursory tests, government referred Tak-un to an adoption company.
Representation in response to a information article about Kim Tak-un revealed within the Tong-a Ilbo on 6 October 1975:
Art work via Lisa Wool-Rim Sjöblom, Korean-Swedish adoptee and artist (@chung.woolrim), Writer equipped (no reuse)
The accept as true with that Swedish government positioned in South Korean adoption procedures can have been as a result of the way in which the Korean social staff offered their paintings. As the primary technology of Koreans skilled in US-style skilled social paintings, they framed world adoption as being concerning the kid, the significance of a circle of relatives, and emotional wellbeing.
The analysis for my upcoming guide presentations that whilst they’ll have really believed in world adoption as a sound type of kid welfare, there have been additionally sensible the reason why this came about. With just about no public investment for kid welfare, many noticed world adoption – the place adoptive folks coated the prices of care – as an excellent strategy to observe their coaching.
In interviews with me, now-retired social staff said flaws in South Korea’s broader kid welfare machine, equivalent to the lack to make sure a kid’s true standing. But, with out public assets to construct a competent machine or prioritise circle of relatives reunification, they regularly handled world adoption as a primary, fairly than a final, lodge.
Additionally, the existing trust on the time that “normal” middle-class households introduced essentially the most solid setting for a kid’s construction equipped additional ethical justification for sending youngsters in another country.
Western government regularly interpreted Korean social staff’ professionalism as proof of shared liberal kid welfare values and positioned sturdy accept as true with of their procedures. When severe flaws surfaced – as in Tak-un’s case – they have been regularly disregarded as exceptions fairly than indicators of deeper systemic issues.
Even if the information have been showed in 1975, Swedish government nonetheless refused to go back the kid. The Swedish consul-general in Seoul on the time, Lars Berg, argued that it was once in Tak-un’s “best interest” to stay in Sweden, fairly than be despatched again to “an uncertain fate of the father without work and residence”.
This mirrored, partly, Sweden’s home realities: like many western societies on the time, Sweden confronted a scarcity of adoptable youngsters, and world adoption had develop into the most important strategy to meet the needs of potential folks.
Within the early Seventies, just about part of all the world over followed youngsters arriving in Sweden got here from South Korea. Which supposed that once problems like Tak-un’s emerged, Swedish government prioritised the rights of adoptive folks, framing their defence within the language of kid welfare.
Sweden’s Adoption Fee has simply launched its personal file on June 2, analyzing the rustic’s world adoption practices, together with the ones involving South Korea. Echoing my analysis findings, it really helpful an finish to permitting Swedes to undertake youngsters from in another country.
So, what become of Tak-un? In the end, South Korean officers acquiesced to the Swedish government, and the Korean adoption company was once cleared of any wrongdoing. Tak-un by no means returned. The closing hint within the archives is his beginning father’s plea to listen to from him.
I situated Tak-un, who now is going via his Swedish identify and lives in a small the city in Sweden. In spite of makes an attempt to achieve him, he didn’t reply. It stays unsure whether or not his father’s message ever reached him or if he is aware of the rest about his early lifestyles in Korea.
This silence isn’t simply private. A machine that claimed to behave for the kid’s welfare as a substitute robotically erased followed youngsters’s pasts, unnoticed their beginning households and made up our minds their futures for them. Tak-un’s tale isn’t only a painful exception – this is a haunting reminder of what was once misplaced within the identify of care.
