INCHEON (SOUTH KOREA)
The Korea Times [Seoul, South Korea]
April 1, 2026
By Hankook Ilbo
State urged to issue official apology
“The priest, drunk on alcohol, called the children one by one, grabbed their bodies, and did not let them go.”
Meeky Woo Flippen, born in 1965 to a Korean mother and a Black American soldier father, recalled the abuse she suffered from 50 years ago.
At 13, when her mother died, she was left at the Catholic child protection facility for mixed-race children, “St. Vincent’s Home,” in Incheon. To escape clergy abuse, she chose adoption abroad.
Her new American family, however, did not want her. She had to wake up at 3 a.m. and work in the strawberry fields.
With money saved over several years, she returned to Korea as an adult and stood before her mother’s grave. The funeral she had been barred from attending, because of her mixed-race appearance, had haunted her for decades.
She choked back tears, saying, “I mustered the courage to document the perpetrator who is still called a ‘great missionary,’ and to inform that overseas adoption was not the answer.”
TRACE, a coalition for truth and accountability on overseas adoption and children’s human rights, filed a request with the Truth and Reconciliation Commission on Monday calling for an investigation into the sexual violence and abuse incidents that occurred at “St. Vincent’s Home” and the forced overseas adoption incidents of mixed-race children.
TRACE is a coalition that gathered KAMRA Korea, which Flippen heads, as well as the Children’s Rights Coalition, EARS Adoption Record Emergency Action, law firm Wongok and public interest law center Fighting Chance.
They held a press conference in front of the commission’s office in Jung-gu, Seoul and said, “Korean society did not embrace mixed-race children as members and pushed them out of the country through the overseas adoption system.”
“The state must officially apologize for the racial discrimination against mixed-race adoptees carried out in the name of a single ethnicity and comprehensively investigate the reality of state violence,” the group added.
TRACE estimates that there were at least 1,000 victims from the mid-1970s to 1982 at “St. Vincent’s Home” alone.
Those who entered the facility during this period testified that the facility was no different from “hell” because the Incheon facility’s director, identified as priest K, at the time, committed sexual abuse.
TRACE demanded that the government establish a dedicated bureau to investigate human rights violations in overseas adoptions and collective accommodation facilities, submitting the testimony of five mixed-race overseas adoptees.
Kwon Hee-jung, director of the Unwed Mothers Archiving and Rights Advocacy Research, criticized the state-backed removals.
“After the Korean War in 1954, both South Korea and the U.S. implemented a policy to send all mixed-race children overseas. Overseas adoption at that time was in effect a forced removal and deportation created by state policy and social structure, rather than an individual’s choice,” she said.
She continued, “It is a history of human rights violations created together by the state and society, not an individual’s misfortune. This 3rd Truth and Reconciliation Commission is the last chance for survivors, many of whom are now elderly.”
This article from the Hankook Ilbo, the sister publication of The Korea Times, is translated by a generative AI system and edited by The Korea Times.