SooJin Pate. From Orphan to Adoptee

Until recently, the adoption of children from non-Western countries by Western parents was not on the research agenda within the academy at large, and those few scholars who even bothered to mention and look at this somewhat peculiar mass movement of children between continents also symptomatically named it the quiet migration. Researchers did not even know how to understand this practice: for psychologists, medical doctors, and social workers it was a child welfare intervention and solely a reproductive technique, while for others it was a forced child migration or even a lingering colonial-style trafficking in human beings. Although the placement of children for adoption between races, cultures, countries, and empires is hardly a new phenomenon, the scale and the institutionalization that was initiated in the postwar period and that peaked in the 2000s with 30,000–40,000 adoptions annually, according to the demographer Peter Selman, must be said to be unprecedented in human history.

Colonialism · Criminology · Economic growth · Economics · Institutionalisation · Intervention (counseling) · Mass migration · Political science · Psychiatry · Sociology · Welfare · Gender Studies · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · Historical Studies on Reproduction, Gender, Health, and Societal Changes · History · Law · Medicine