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IOL News
07-07-2025
- Science
- IOL News
Lovebugs swarm South Korea's cities and hiking trails
A portion of Incheon is seen behind a cloud of lovebugs. Image: Jintak Han/The Washington Post Lovebugs - so named for how the male and female cling together as they mate in flight - are swarming South Korea. They can be seen in the hilltops that dot South Korea's bustling cities. They're on the windows of high-rise office buildings. They're on sidewalks, inside convenience stores, on hiking trails and all over city streetlights. They're everywhere. The bugs are harmless, but they are becoming increasingly annoying to the country's more than 50 million residents. 'I thought it was the apocalypse,' said Kim Jaewoong, a 36-year-old welder who ran into a swarm of these bugs last week on Gyeyangsan, a small mountain in the port city of Incheon, an hour drive west of Seoul. Mating lovebugs cover the side of a rock. Image: Jintak Han/The Washington Post Kim was jogging up the mountain on his usual weekend exercise route on Saturday and noticed clumps of dead and live plecia longiforceps, better known as lovebugs. the dark, winged insects typically measure just under half an inch. There were many of them, but Kim shrugged them off, thinking he would see fewer on the mountaintop. At the summit, dead lovebugs were piled up in mounds up to 4 inches tall, he said. Adult lovebugs have a lifespan of three to seven days, according to South Korea's Ministry of Environment. 'It became difficult to breathe. If you tried to breathe, you would get them in your nose and mouth,' he said. The insects are not native to South Korea. The first photographic evidence of the lovebugs in South Korea is from 2015 in Incheon, according to Shin Seunggwan, an associate professor at Seoul National University's School of Biological Sciences. Shin suspects they could be from China's Shandong Peninsula, home to lovebugs whose genetics are the most similar to those in South Korea. 'We haven't confirmed they're from there,' Shin said. 'But it's the likeliest place of origin,' he added. A municipal worker at the Gyeyangsan peak sprays water to clean dead lovebugs off of the stairs. Image: Jintak Han/The Washington Post The lovebugs are expected to abound in South Korea for the next several years, possibly a decade or more, according to Shin. Adult lovebugs have no natural predators and have high breeding rates, he said. Animals that could feed on the insects need time to learn they are edible. It took at least a decade for native animals to recognize other nonindigenous species in Korea like the American bullfrog and Spotted Lanternfly as prey, he said. It took 30 years for adult lovebugs in Florida to become prey, he added. Climate change could be a factor in their proliferation, Shin said. South Korea's temperatures have risen by 1.4 degrees Celsius, or 2.5 degrees Fahrenheit, in the last 30 years compared to the 1912-1941 period, according to government tallies. But the more direct cause for the explosion of the lovebug population here, Shin said, is likelier to be the urban heat island effect - a term used to describe how cities are hotter than rural areas due to the abundance of concrete and the lack of natural shade. Higher temperatures in urban areas - where lovebugs tend to be found - allow more of the insects and their larvae to survive the winter, he said. Gyeyangsan, while covered with trees, is in the urban Incheon area. At the bottom of Gyeyangsan on Thursday, store owners were busy trying to keep out the pesky insects, warning patrons to close the door quickly to prevent more of the insects from entering the establishment. But they were already getting settled - resting on the floor, the freezer windows and the lights.
Yahoo
15-05-2025
- General
- Yahoo
Report Exposes the Painful History of International Adoption
Boon Young Han, co-founder of the Danish Korean Rights Group, stands for a portrait at the offices of KoRoot, an advocacy organization for international adoptees from South Korea, on Thursday, March 27, 2025 in Seoul, South Korea. (Photo by Jintak Han/The Washington Post via Getty Images) Credit - Jintak Han—TheIn March, South Korea's Truth and Reconciliation Committee (TRC) released its report on the country's international adoption system. After a three-year investigation, the committee found evidence that, among other widespread abuses, adoption agencies fabricated documents, misrepresented children as orphans available to be adopted, and sent children overseas without the consent of their biological families. Concluding that the human rights of adoptees and birth parents were violated, the TRC has recommended that the Korean government issue an official apology. For many, these findings are shocking but not surprising. Adoptees who have searched for information about their birth families and academics who have studied international adoption have long known of cases in which one child was substituted at the last minute for another—or of birth mothers who were coerced or tricked into relinquishing their children. Adoptees have located birth parents they were told were dead. The agencies that arranged their adoptions have lied to adoptees and withheld information. Activists in Korea, many of whom are international adoptees who returned as adults, have been fighting to draw attention to these cases for years. South Korea has been winding down the practice of international adoption, but the practice continues there and around the world, even if at a much slower pace than in previous decades. But even if it stopped tomorrow, the system that has moved hundreds of thousands of children around the world was built on the foundations of Korean adoption, which have been revealed as deeply problematic. International adoption is not as old as some might think. Americans had adopted internationally on an ad hoc basis and in small numbers in the years before and after World War II, but systematic international adoption is rooted in the aftermath of the Korean War (1950-1953) when Americans began adopting children from South Korea. Originally, these adoptions were used as a temporary effort to remove mixed-race 'GI babies' born to Korean women and fathered by foreign men, presumed to be American military personnel. Observers quickly concluded that these children had no future in Korea for three reasons: they were racially mixed in a society that thought of itself as racially pure; they were the children of women who were assumed to be sex workers; and they were fatherless in a highly patriarchal society, and in which citizenship flowed through fathers, not mothers. How Online Adoption Ads Prey on Pregnant People In the United States, which had historically excluded Asian immigrants, Korean-white children's racial mixture made them imaginable as family members for the white parents who adopted most of them. So did Americans' understanding of these children as coming from a Christian, democratic South Korea. In the context of the Cold War, these transracial, international adoptions were powerful symbols of Americans' new commitment to antiracism, despite the persistence of racist policies in immigration, housing, and employment. Korean children first came to the United States under a series of temporary refugee laws, but Americans' demand for foreign children was strong enough that Congress made international adoption a permanent part of immigration law in 1961. South Korea, which had facilitated international adoption since the 1950s then enacted a law to make it easier for foreigners to adopt. With these legal mechanisms in place, the Korean adoption system grew. Beginning in the 1960s, it encompassed a wider range of children: the children of the poor, children with disabilities, and then, by the 1980s, the children of single mothers. South Korea also began sending children to a widening array of receiving countries in Europe, as well as Canada and Australia. Its adoption agencies' streamlined policies and processes made the country the so-called "Cadillac of international adoption," offering speed, professionalism, and healthy babies. South Korea remained the number one source of children for adoption until the 1990s, long after the Korean War had ended. The international adoption system that began in Korea served as a template as the practice spread to countries around the world, including Vietnam, Colombia, and Guatemala in the 1970s and 1980s, and Russia and China in the 1990s. In the early 2000s, Christian evangelicals in the U.S. embraced the cause of rescuing orphans, and adopted children from Ethiopia, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and Haiti. Although parents in the West adopted for a range of humanitarian and religious reasons, they also looked abroad because they faced a shortage of adoptable babies at home. This complex combination of altruism and consumerism accompanied international adoption as it spread and developed into what one consultant to UNICEF called 'a demand-driven business.' Beyond these market dynamics, governments and child welfare agencies took up the logic behind international adoption that had been established in Korea: that it was better for a child to grow up in a wealthy western country than to live in a poor home in the culture and country of their birth, and that governments should focus on facilitating international adoption rather than on keeping families together. As adoption agencies entered countries struggling with poverty, instability, or natural disaster, they brought with them the system created in Korea. Orphanages supported by western sponsorship money were disproportionately wealthier than the communities around them. It also made them more attractive to poor parents who wanted their children to have access to those resources or perhaps just needed some childcare while they worked. Once children were in an orphanage, parents could be convinced – or coerced – into relinquishing them for adoption. And once westerners began to demand 'orphans' from a country, the incentives for adoption agencies to provide them only increased, leading to more coercion and fraud. Over the past several decades, international adoption has served the best interest of the Korean government. Rather than investing in social welfare programs or supporting poor families and single mothers, the Korean government sent its children overseas. Its orphanages, hospitals, maternity homes, adoption agencies, and police received donations and gratitude payments from foreign adopters. International adoption also allowed Koreans to maintain carefully enforced ideas of bloodline purity, which hindered domestic adoption, and Confucian patriarchy, which made single motherhood an impossibility and which produced more children for international adoption. Americans have adopted internationally for decades without having to truly confront the global inequalities that made such a system possible, and which continue to sustain it. They have been able to choose from a variety of countries, comparing factors like cost, ease, type of child available, and processing time. Although they may have adopted with the best of intentions, they benefited from a system that exploited the weak and vulnerable in other countries. As the problems of international adoption have become more widely known, more adoptive parents have grappled with the realization that some of the children they adopted were never orphans at all, or never properly relinquished. My White Adoptive Parents Struggled to See Me as Korean. Would They Have Understood My Anger at the Rise in Anti-Asian Violence? The corruption that comes from the unavoidable market dynamics of international adoption have followed it wherever it has gone. Recognizing this, countries from Guatemala to China have stopped sending children abroad, and Denmark has stopped receiving them. Sweden ended international adoption from South Korea in 2023 in response to the kinds of allegations the TRC confirmed. The United States should investigate its role in the global international adoption system it pioneered in South Korea and has supported ever since. At a minimum, the U.S. should give citizenship to the thousands of adoptees who were never naturalized by their parents, and who are now at risk for deportation. Congress enacted the Child Citizenship Act of 2000 to ensure that international adoptees acquired U.S, citizenship more or less automatically, but the law fails to cover an unknown number of adoptees (somewhere between 18,000 to 75,000) who were already adults when the law passed. The Adoptee Citizenship Act, which is intended to fix this oversight, has been introduced twice in Congress to no effect. As for South Korea, the TRC's report addresses just 56 of the 367 cases that international adoptees have brought to its attention. The TRC has now been suspended and it is unclear whether the investigation will continue. But anywhere from 150,000 to 200,000 Korean children have been sent overseas for adoption since the 1950s, and they deserve answers about their origins. Meaningful redress demands continued efforts to uncover the truths beneath the international adoption industry—no matter how painful they may be. Arissa H. Oh is Associate Professor in the History Department at Boston College and the author of To Save the Children of Korea: The Cold War Origins of International Adoption. Made by History takes readers beyond the headlines with articles written and edited by professional historians. Learn more about Made by History at TIME here. Opinions expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of TIME editors. Write to Made by History at madebyhistory@
