The AP has uncovered direct evidence that 19 children were adopted out of a notorious South Korean facility that kidnapped, abused and enslaved children and the disabled for a generation decades ago. There were probably many more.
In this April 2, 2019, photo, Choi Seung-woo, a victim of Brothers Home, speaks during an interview in front of National Assembly in Seoul, South Korea. Choi and a small number of other Brothers Home inmates have been camping out in front of the National Assembly’s gate for more than two years calling for lawmakers to pass a bill that would launch a full investigation into past human rights atrocities, including the Brothers Home incident.
“One of my main questions is wondering if I was supposed to be , or if my parents, my biological parents, are still out there looking for me,” said Hwang, who didn’t know she had been at Brothers. “Why me?” Adoptive parents in the West were unaware of the horrors that were happening at the place their children once lived or that their payments likely helped fund an abusive facility that used slave labor to enrich its owner. Biological parents may not have known that their children were at Brothers, let alone sent overseas.
Dozens of times, according to Lee, the children in the photos would disappear from Brothers just days after the letters were sent. Lee said he always wondered whether the biological parents of those children knew they had been brought to Brothers and then sent abroad.“You would see 70 or 80 babies in the infant’s nursery, and then, one day, 20 or 40 would be suddenly gone,” he said. “This happened repeatedly.
Because of the loss of records, there’s no direct evidence to back the claims that adoptions were part of Brothers owner Park In-keun’s money-making operations. But experts and former workers say the Brothers owner wouldn’t have sent children for adoption unless he was getting more money than he got from keeping them at the compound, where he received government subsidies for each inmate and eventually could use them as slave labor.
Park, the Brothers owner, died in 2016. The former No. 2 at the facility, Lim Young Soon, acknowledged that there had been some adoptions, without providing specifics. When contacted by the AP, the U.S.-based Holt International said it did not know whether any of its adoptees came from Brothers. However, a founding member of Holt confirmed before his death last year that Holt Children’s Services in Seoul placed children from Brothers for adoption.
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