Did anyone check if our Korean parents actually gave consent?
Some thoughts on the upcoming Korea-Australia adoptions investigation
What were the red flags🚩?
How did they get around the absence of parental consent?
Preparations for the investigation into Australia’s Korean adoption program have begun and we might see some interim findings by the end of the year.
The hope is that the investigation will unearth reasons why no one in Australia stood up and asked about all the gaps and weirdness in our documents.
Fictionalised boilerplate relinquishment stories painting our mothers uniformly as alone, unwed and destitute, willingly giving us up after some tough deliberation.
Family Registries that say we are orphans and have no mother or father (when this is untrue as documented in our papers).
No parental consent forms.
The first two, maybe hint at turning a blind eye to possible malfeasance. Was Eastern given a huge benefit of the doubt here? Yes. Were any local laws broken or bypassed? Probably not.
But the third one? Hmm.
Every state in Australia has pretty clear laws about needing parental consent before an adoption can be finalised.
Did anyone in Australia see a consent form signed by our parents? Nope. None at all. They let us all be adopted without any proof that our parents had actually consented. Weird right?
Sometimes, birth parents don’t stick around to give consent and then can’t be contacted to give it at the time of their kid’s adoption. So the judge in those cases can dispense with consent. This basically means that because of practical difficulty in obtaining it, they can declare that the parent’s consent is not required and go ahead with the adoption.
This method was most likely used for a lot of us. But like, as a judge, if you’re seeing successive cases with no evidence of parental consent, wouldn’t you raise this and ask why you’re continually having to dispense with consent? Particularly when the papers say that the mother willingly gave the baby up. Where’s the consent form?
The other way was probably that once Eastern got us, they became our guardian. Then when we got to Australia, the Immigration Minister became our guardian. Then the state minister of the adoption department became our guardian. And technically a “guardian” can consent to the child’s adoption. And that they did, without question.
Was this really an issue?
In both of the above cases, there were ways to bypass the absence of parental consent. But shouldn’t we ask ourselves, if this was happening systematically, was anyone actually ever concerned with whether we’d really been given up wilfully and with informed consent?
If no one was ever asking, then the Australian side was simply an extension of the Korean adoptee supply pipeline in its unquestioning approval of every baby that Eastern sent their way. If there was no oversight or subjective assessment of adoptability, then any baby that Eastern packaged up and sent would be accepted by Australia whether that baby was legitimately relinquished, relinquished through coercion or duress or taken illegally from its parents.
What is the point of Australian laws that require parental consent, if parental consent is actually never required?
These are things the investigation must understand and recognise. If it doesn’t then it will be for nothing.
You can read more about the investigation here.