The Brothers' Home (Korean: 형제복지원) was an internment camp located in Busan, South Korea during the 1970s and '80s. During its operation, it held 20 factories and thousands of people who were rounded up off of the street, the homeless some of whom were children, in addition to college students who were protesting the regime. Only 10% of internees were actually homeless. The camp was home to some of the worst human rights abuses in South Korea during the period, which were exposed in AP and CNN articles in 2016.The South Korean government called the Brothers' Home and other similar concentration camps opened by the Chun Doo-hwan regime during the fourth and fifth republics "welfare centers".
A DW news article reports a minimum of 516 people died over the course of 20 years at the Brothers' Home. Widespread torture was common in these welfare centers. In the 1990s, construction labourers dug up about 100 human bones on the mountain just outside where it stood.
The Brothers Home was one of the adoption centers that engaged in the trafficking in South Korea and the adoption agencies and South Korean government destroyed tons of documents to hide their activities and gave false identities to the children while selling them. The Brothers Home Facility sold the adoptees to Australia, Europe and North America and they also raped and used the children as slaves themselves. AP investigated adoptions from 1979-1986 at the Brothers Home and interviewed a woman, J. Hwang who was sold to be adopted in North America by the Brothers Home after she was left there by police in 1982 at age 4. Every child earned the Brothers 10 dollars per month paid by the Korea Christian Crusade adoption agency which later became Eastern Social Welfare Society. Under South Korea's military dictatorship in the 1970s and 1980s, white parents in Europe, Australia and the United States adopted 200,000 majority female South Korean children, which is the biggest adoptee diaspora in the world. The European countries included Belgium, Germany, Netherlands, Norway, Denmark. This was a major human rights violation by the military dictatorship as most of the Korean girls were not real orphans and had living biological parents but were given false papers to show that they were orphans and exported to white parents for money. The Korea Welfare Services, Eastern Social Welfare Society, Korea Social Service and Holt Children’s Services were the adoption agencies involved in the trafficking of the girls. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission began investigating the scandal in 2022. The military leaders were linked to the agencies board menbers and they wanted to establish closer links with the west and decrease South Korea's population. South Korea's Korean Broadcasting System reported on the case of the Korean girl Kim Yu-ri who was taken away from her biological Korean parents and adopted to a French couple where she was raped and molested by the French adopted father. Across Australia, Europe and the United States, the majority female Korean adoptees asked for an investigation from the Truth and Reconciliation Commission into the child trafficking scandal. Denmark was one of the recipients of the Korean adoptees sold by Korea Social Service and Holt Children's Services. Holt Children’s Service was sued by a Korean adoptee in the US for compensation.
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