Website to Unite Kopinos with Fathers Stirs Controversy
MANILA: A website for locating Korean men who fathered babies with Filipina women out of wedlock and abandoned them has created controversy over privacy issues, according to a media report.
The website, kopinofather.wordpress.com, discloses the faces of such Korean fathers, along with their names and the places where they stayed in the Philippines, Korea Times reported.
Some photos depict the men alone, and others show them together with the Filipina women or even with their children when they lived together in the country, the report said.
The names, ages and addresses of the fathers are often false, as many provided false information to the Filipina women while dating.
The photos from the mothers were given to “We Love Kopino,” a civic group based in the Philippines which runs the website, the news report said.
“I had a Filipina friend who was looking for the father of her Kopino son,” Koo Bon-chang, 54, who founded the NGO and started the website in April 2015 reportedly said. “The father left her with a fake address. She had no means to find him, and I wanted to help her.”
He told her disclosing photos and names would be the fastest way to track down the fathers.
He was soon proven right. Calls began coming in, either from the fathers themselves or those who knew the fathers, the news report said.
When a father contacts the group, it links him with the mother. The group removes the photo only when the mother consents. Since the website’s opening, it has posted 42 photos and 30 Kopino offspring have found their fathers, the news report said.
NGOs in the Philippines and Korea estimate the number of Kopinos at as many as 30,000. Tracking them all is impossible, and the Korean Embassy in the Philippines has been urged to keep count, but has not done so, the news report said.
The website, however, caused controversy over its infringements on the fathers’ privacy because it makes public their photos, Korea Times reported.
“In fact, three people threatened to sue me,” Koo said. “How could they? What they did to these children is incomparable to what I have done to them.”