In Korea, discussions of the issue of welfare began with the people’s efforts to save children. Civilian organizations began to discuss or study the child care issue, or even founded facilities and tried to operate them, around the time of the Korean war. At the time, the children who needed special care were the children on the street. They had no place to stay, so they shined people’s shoes or lived off selling things, or even begged for food. And because of the war, the number of the children on the street were literally skyrocketing.
In the 1950s, they were considered as a social problem that had to be remedied, to save the face of the state and also the future generation. So, instead of trying to protect them, the government rather wanted to get rid of them completely, but all they could do was to get them off the street, and rush them into the civilian facilities.
Later, the May 16th Military regime oppressed the activities of the civilian facilities, and at the same time enacted a Child Welfare Act, which was based upon previous discussions of child care that took place in the 1950s. Yet unlike the Second Republic which tried to ‘protect’ and ‘enlighten’ the children on the street, the Military regime returned to the 1950s’ policy of getting rid of them. The regime in fact argued that getting rid of the street children would be instrumental in the task of establishing a social order, and that doing so would be the proud accomplishment of the regime. But in the process of spotting them and rushing them into facilities, the authorities only tried to get more and more of them, and the children’s basic rights were not respected. Children put into facilities were controlled under a very harsh condition.
The centerpiece of the Military regime’s ‘Children on the street’ policy was to send them off to lands which needed cultivation and reclamation. Children in relatively older ages, recruited by the government and civilian facilities, were sent there under the name of serving as the ‘Reclamation party,’ or as ‘Worker pioneers.’ Many of them were sent to foreshore areas waiting reclamation, or forest areas in the Gang’weon-do province that were due to be transformed into agricultural regions. They were under extreme monitoring and control, as if they were enlisted in the army, even after they settled there. The government tried to marry them with women who had histories of prostitution just to keep them there, yet the workers were never happy, with all the excruciating workload and hard labor. The regime and the authorities all patted themselves on the back, arguing that with the Settlement project children on the street were transformed into ’industrial warriors,’ yet they were in fact deprived of their most fundamental rights.