Did anyone else watch this documentary that aired yesterday? Wondering other’s thoughts on it. It was even more heartbreaking to watch than I thought it would be. I was adopted from Korea through Holt and seeing these stories come to light really makes me wonder if my birth parents didn’t really abandon me.
Posted by lauren_76
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Didn’t watch the full 90 minute documentary passed the first 5 minutes, but I immediately knew this would be about Holt. (right?)
The “forced” adoption shinanigans by Holt International Children’s Services hhad been pretty infamaous since the early 2000s and there have been multiple legal cases about this since 80s and 90s. It’s been pretty well known in South Korea before it’s now being raised as an issue internationally. These are international adoption agencies that established business in various Asian and African countries so that war orphans or unwanted orphans in general from the developing countries got adopted into North America or Europe.
Unfortunately, what happened was that a lot of non-orphans were kidnapped and sold into these agencies where the NGO faked the documents to basically “sell” these orphans overseas for international adoption. Despite that, Holt has been such a huge name in South Korea for adoption, that even after the economic development, adoption became synonymous with “international adoption” because this is the only major thing Korea has ever experienced in terms of modern adoption since Korean War.
I’m hope the agency HQ itself is run with good faith – or else they wouldn’t have been rewarded with all these awards by American government, international organizations. But there are so many things that are overlooked within the organization of the agency that they completely failed in preventing these things from happening, at least in South Korea it was always a mixed bag of emotion for decades.