South Sudan’s youth swept up in gang culture and street violence amid wider conflict

Active and former gang members try to support each other to get out of the gangs in Gudele, in South Sudan’s capital, Juba. Photographs by Florence Miettaux Photograph: Florence Miettaux/The Guardian

In June, a video of a gang-rape started circulating online in South Sudan. Filmed and posted on social media by the perpetrators, it showed a gang of visibly intoxicated young men taking turns to sexually assault a 16-year-old girl in a murky room in the Sherikat neighbourhood of the country’s capital, Juba. Later, it emerged that the victim belonged to a rival gang, and that the rape and the video were an act of revenge.

The rape prompted widespread outrage. Some called for mob justice; others for the perpetrators to be apprehended and sentenced to death. There was a city-wide crackdown on gangs and within weeks the authorities announced that more than 600 youths had been arrested, although more than half were later released without charge. For former gang members Peter Amule and Alaak Akuei, now on the frontline of trying to stem the flow of gang violence in South Sudan, it was a depressingly familiar, and failed, response to a deeper issue.