South Korea admits to 'mass exporting' children for adoption

Also, check out the criminal justice system. Something like a 98 or 99% conviction rate, iirc. Kinda insane.

And the corollary there is that a blind eye is turned towards a LOT of things, especially if it involves yakuza and it’s not reasonably serious. And the attendant corruption that comes with that, of course.

Can’t say it holds a candle to what the US is doing these days though.

I agree with you. The cultural export is fine. If you were rich, being there would be fine. If you are a worker in an office, it sounds awful.

the time period also was during the height of adoptions, which was also the time period of kidnappings.

basically the demand for children was at a high, and there were a lot of bad actors in the market "making supply" where that supply came from varied.

True, there is also the option it is just a ploy to appease

Most of the time it's accompanied by "sins of the father" rhetoric where nothing changes but we'll see I guess

It's a start I suppose. Hopefully it can keep the inertia.

They're admitting that now dead people did bad things a long time ago. Not exactly impressive

They are admitting to stuff in this article..

There are some super fucked up societal dynamics in SK. Japan, China, and a lot of other East Asian countries with more conformist cultures have a depressing amount of that. It’s one of the reasons I don’t think I could put up with living in Japan long-term, despite enjoying a lot of the other cultural aspects enormously.

South Korea is a weird place. They do some things really, really well. But the things they do badly, they're really bad at it, and even worse they refuse to admit having a problem.

The program was started because of the Korean War.

That was what I was thinking too, but looks like it's about children way back in the day.

Sounds to me like a loophole excuse for human trafficking.

Money. Someone was making money off of it somehow, and was willing to do terrible things to get more.

WTF is a country with a .75 fertility rate exporting the few children it has?

(fertility is measured as the average children each woman has. You need a 2.1 to maintain population.)

Why would they ever approve the adoption of a 13-year-old to another continent? This seems extremely sus even without any evidence of wrongdoing.

If not the worst then like top three lowest birth rates in the world and they're exporting kids. Foolishness.