This study explores the lived experiences of adolescents in grandparent kinship care in South Korea, drawing on interviews with 22 grandparent–adolescent pairs to examine how young people respond to adversity, build support, and exercise agency. Despite widespread experiences of parental abandonment and stigma, adolescents demonstrated resilience and intentionality, highlighting the need for stronger, coordinated services to support grandparent kinship families within Korea’s underdeveloped foster care system.

Adam Crapser has become something of a cause celebre for what critics say is a flawed United States law that unfairly leaves tens of thousands of international adoptees in limbo without citizenship.

A South Korean commission found evidence that women were pressured into giving away their infants for foreign adoptions after giving birth at government-funded facilities where thousands of people were confined and enslaved from the 1960s to the 1980s.

Adoptees sent to Europe and the US say they were wrongly removed from their families as government in Seoul actively promoted adoption.

South Korea experienced international scrutiny over its irregular intercountry adoption practices in the 1980s. However, it eventually came to be viewed as a model of transparent and efficient adoptions. This façade disguises an orphan adoption system that has become entrenched over the decades. Today, adoptees continue to lobby for their right to origins. This paper explores South Korea’s laws and policies, which nullified the rights of adoptees, and it calls for receiving countries to assume co-responsibility to restore these rights.

This seminar was given as part of the Korean Adoptee Adoption Research Network's inaugural seminar series, The Right to Know. Each speaker of the series discussed the concept of the right to origin and examined the broader social, legal and political implications in South Korea as a sending country along with experiences from North America and Europe as receiving countries.

This brief discusses ways in which the roles and functions of Korea’s child welfare facilities should change to better meet the diverse needs of children in need.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, life in residential facilities for people with disabilities in South Korea has become even more precarious, if not deadly, said Lee Jung-ha, who heads the advocacy group Padosan, in an interview for this article from Hankyoreh.

This short essay presents unwed single mothers’ increased vulnerabilities during the COVID-19 pandemic in terms of childcare, financial crisis, and mental health.

The purpose of this study was to longitudinally examine the effects of stigma on the development of children living in out-of-home care situations, specifically with regards to self-esteem and antisocial behavior.