• Journal of the Korean association of regional geographers
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• v.13 no.6
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• pp.695-711
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• 2007

Research on intercountry adoption was strongly needed in Korea; however, there were only a few research in geography on the United States. It is hard to find the geographical research on Korea-born adoptees in Europe. This research analyzed spatial distribution of Korea-born adoptees in Europe where adopted the largest number of Koreans after the United States. Since 1956 when Korea-born children were first adopted in Norway, the number of adoptees had increased rapidly until 1978. In the early 1970s, Korean children had adopted more in Europe than the Unites States. Even though the number of intercountry adoptees temporarily decreased after the Seoul Olympic in 1988, Korean children have been still adopted at a settled numbers. In the beginning period (1956$\sim$70) of adoption in Europe, the Korean war orphans and abandoned children were adopted by Sweden, Norway and Belgium. In the second period (1971$\sim$90), the number of Korean adoptees were social orphans as a result of rapid industrialization. The number of adoptees increased rapidly and their destination extended into ten countries including the Western Europe such as France, Germany, Italy and United Kingdom. In the third period after 1991, the adoptees were mainly from unmarried mothers. The number of adoptees decreased as the result of that the Korean government attempted to reduce the intercountry adoption and to increase the domestic adoption. Their destination reduced into Northern European countries, France and Luxemburg. Those countries kept adopting settled number of Korean children. Female Korean adoptees used to outnumber male Korean adoptees; however the sex ratio was reversed recently. The age of adoptees became to lower, so most of Korea-born adoptees were under one-year old.

• Journal of Family Resource Management and Policy Review
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• v.26 no.2
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• pp.1-17
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• 2022

This study provides a critical analysis of the Family Center's programs for adoptive families by interviewing employees at these centers and at Adoption Agencies who have experiences with adoption programs. For this study, nine such workers from three separate Family Centers and three such workers from two separate Adoption Agencies have (voluntarily) engaged in in-depth interviews. Major findings from the interviews are that the Family Centers were initially motivated to carry out adoption family programs for three principal reasons: they located many families (in need of adoption family program); potential adoptees were interested in the program; adoption families participated in the pre-existing programs such as Self-help Group and Co-parenting Space. Workers in the study also reported that they approach to an adoption family and their contemplation on ways to provide better services to the adoption families. They don't have any official and formal manual or guidelines from the Government Ministries and offices such as Korean Institute for Healthy Family; as a result, the workers at Family Centers have endeavored to gain connection with Adoption Agencies in hopes of cooperation with them and to improve the services at Family Centers. For benefits of Family Centers as a delivery system, they mentioned nationwide infrastructure, family professional, and arrangement of integrated program for family. For improvements, they listed awareness education based on a thorough consideration of adoptee's varied characteristics, close cooperation with adoption institutions, provision of basic operational manual from Korean Institute for Healthy Family, and governmental efforts to enlarge the consideration pool for families.