By Suraj Karowa/ANW, NOVEMBER 15, 2025
Sydney, Australia
– Ju-rye Hwang believed for decades that her biological parents in South Korea had died, leaving her an orphan shipped to North America at age six.
But a shocking 2016 phone call from a Seoul journalist shattered that narrative, revealing she was a victim of one of the country’s most notorious human rights scandals: illegal abduction, forced confinement at the infamous Brothers Home, and trafficking into international adoption.
“I was not an orphan,” Hwang, now a 44-year-old professional in Sydney, told Al Jazeera. “It was most certain that I was illegally adopted for profit.” The revelation left her reeling. “I broke down and lost my breath. I felt physically ill.”
Hwang’s story, emblematic of thousands ensnared in South Korea’s 1970s-80s “vagrancy crackdown,” exposes a grim chapter of state-sanctioned abuse masked as urban beautification.
Under military dictator Chun Doo-hwan, authorities rounded up the homeless, poor, and marginalized to polish the nation’s image ahead of the 1988 Seoul Olympics.
Chun infamously declared, “Beggars don’t exist here,” as police vans prowled streets, abducting children and adults alike.
Incentivized by a points-based system—five points for a “vagrant” versus two for a petty thief—officers funneled victims to facilities like Brothers Home in Busan.
Founded in 1975 by ex-military boxer Park In-geun, the center masqueraded as a vocational welfare hub but operated as a profit-driven prison.
State subsidies swelled with inmate numbers; up to 95% arrived via police sweeps, per a 1987 prosecutor’s report. At its 1984 peak, 4,300 souls crammed its walls, including 38,000 detained from 1976-1987. Official deaths: 657. Unofficial toll: far higher.
Inside, horror reigned. Children like four-year-old Hwang, “admitted” on November 23, 1982, after police claimed to find her in Busan’s Jurye-dong—coincidentally, the home’s neighborhood—endured shaved heads, military drills, and unpaid factory labor crafting shoes and fishing rods.
Her intake form, stamped with ID 821112646, chillingly notes: “Upon arrival, the child said absolutely nothing.” A “mugshot” captures her wide-eyed terror; tiny fingerprints seal the document. Deemed “healthy—capable of labour work,” she stayed nine months before transfer to an orphanage, her details sanitized for adoption.
Park, who named her “Ju-rye” after the supposed find-spot, embezzled millions in inmate wages, Al Jazeera’s 101 East revealed in 2021. The home also fed South Korea’s adoption pipeline, exporting over 170,000 children post-Korean War.
Newborns and toddlers vanished overnight, funneled to agencies that falsified records—altering names, ages, photos—to deem them “orphans.” Public notices for relatives? A sham, often published post-adoption in the wrong city.
Hwang’s fragmented memories—a towering iron gate, children in an underground pool—once seemed fanciful. In 2022, browsing a Brothers Home archive site with a fellow adoptee’s help, they snapped into focus: the gate’s entrance, the pool’s reality.
“It was overwhelming to know I wasn’t imagining,” she said, voice quavering. “That girl is probably scared and in shock… an innocent child with a mugshot.”
Convicted she was kidnapped—“I was never supposed to be there as a four-year-old”—Hwang’s adoption file gushes: outgoing, Bible-quoting, with 20 healthy teeth and skills belying a “street kid” label.
In 2021, DNA testing matched her to a full sibling in Belgium, adopted months earlier with another brother. Their files claim abandonment 300km away in Anyang, August 1982. “Surreal,” she recalls of their video call. “He looked so much like me—the face, the slender hands.”
A hazy memory lingers: a woman with permed hair, glimpsed from behind. “The only image that stayed… I believe it was my mother.” Hope flickers for reunion, a true name, her erased identity. “Everything was wiped: my family, my roots. No one has the right.”
South Korea’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, probing historical abuses, validated her ordeal in 2025: “gross human rights violations” via unlawful authority. Its 2022 report decried Brothers Home’s enforced disappearances, forced labor, sexual violence, and education denial as unconstitutional. The state, it charged, concealed the scandal.
This year, it confirmed 31 illegal adoptions from the home, identifying 17 mothers—some coerced, like a pregnant inmate whose newborn was shipped abroad months after birth, consent dubious under duress.
Park died unapologetic in 2016, honored by Chun in 1984. His son, in Netflix’s “The Echoes of Survivors,” blamed government orders but issued a family-first apology.
Relatives in Sydney—Park’s daughter runs a golf range—dismiss abuses. Hwang, living blocks away, muses: “Things happen for a reason… My message? Right your wrongs.”
Broader reckoning stirs. In October 2025, President Lee Jae-myung apologized for the “child-exporting” era, decrying falsified records and unchecked agencies.
The commission slammed government complicity in “mass exportation.” Recent Supreme Court wins mandate state compensation, dropping appeals on pre-1975 abuses too.
Yet gaps persist: no national police or Busan apology; records torched. Victims like former inmate Lee Chae-shik, held six years, recall toddlers “gone one day.”
Ex-lawmaker Moon Jeong-su decries police snatching “shoe shiners, gum sellers, kids playing outside.”
Hwang’s fight endures. “I’d love my real name—the one my parents gave.” In Sydney’s sun, poring over faded photos, she embodies resilience amid erasure. Her story demands not just amends, but remembrance: South Korea’s “miracle” built on stolen lives.