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.

“You can’t stop this gang stuff by force; you need to use love, and to remind them about God,” says Amule, 35.

Akuei, 24, who has set up a football academy in Sherikat, was dismayed by the attack. “I was very disappointed and I felt discouraged because these boys, we are working with them, we know some of them, but they are not listening. But we have to be strong, because we cannot give up.”

Street gangs have proliferated since South Sudan’s independence in 2011 and the five-year civil war that followed. Thefts of handbags or phones by teenage boys on speeding bodas, the small motorcycles common in east Africa, have become commonplace across the country, especially in Juba, and it is not unusual to see street battles involving knives and machetes between rival crews.

But families say young people with no criminal links were caught up in the police crackdown, and parents were reported to be unable to locate their children at detention facilities, as allegations surfaced of forced conscription into the South Sudan People’s Defence Forces, the government army that is at war with rebel forces in parts of the country.

Since March, fighting has been particularly intense in the north-eastern region of Upper Nile, leading to the house arrest of Riek Machar, first vice-president, in Juba. Machar, with President Salva Kiir, was the main signatory of the 2018 peace deal, which the UN says has nearly collapsed.

During a plenary session of the national parliament on 28 July, Samuel Buhari Loti, an MP from Eastern Equatoria state, expressed alarm that the “so-called crackdown … has gone beyond gangs”.

“Now, our young people are being harassed, arrested, and some even killed. Many are disappearing … and later appear in Malakal [capital of Upper Nile] as soldiers,” he says. “This is deeply troubling.”

Edmund Yakani, executive director of Community Empowerment for Progress Organisation (Cepo), a leading South Sudanese civil society organisation, says he has been contacted by numerous families looking for their sons.

“Information is coming out that some of them are children and have died in the army barracks in Malakal,” he says.

On 1 August, Machar’s opposition movement, the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement-in-Opposition (SPLA-IO), released a video of teenagers addressing the camera in various South Sudanese languages. Filmed at an undisclosed location controlled by the opposition in Nyirol county, in the north of Jonglei state, the boys describe how they were taken from Juba to Malakal after being arrested and put in jail.

In a message accompanying the video, a SPLA-IO spokesperson, Lam Paul Gabriel, called on the International Committee of the Red Cross, the UN children’s fund Unicef and the UN mission in South Sudan (UNMISS) “to help reunite these young boys with their families in Juba”.

Authorities have publicly denied the allegations and did not respond to a request for comment.

In Juba’s Gudele neighbourhood, the yard of Amule’s home has become a meeting point for teenagers and social workers from Grassroots Empowerment and Development Organization (Gredo), an NGO supported by Unicef.

A dozen boys aged 15 to 20 sit in the shade of a small mango tree. All ended up in gangs due to similar circumstances: a lack of money led them to drop out of school and join a gang to start stealing. Once they were part of a gang, fear for their own safety and involvement in violence make it very difficult to leave.

“For you to leave a gang, there are conditions,” Amule explains. He left in 2016, after 14 years of gang life. “In my case, I had to buy [the leader] a motorcycle so they could set me free.

“You take a lot of drugs, and when you do so, you won’t even care about your own mother, because these drugs mess up your mind. You have no limits.”

Sherikat, the Juba suburb where the girl was raped, is divided into two territories controlled by two main gangs: Hip Hop Riders and West Coast. In 2021 Gredo opened a youth centre on the border between the two areas. Today, it has about 150 members.

Decades of war have taken a heavy toll on South Sudanese families, says Gredo’s Sakaya Peter. “Most of these children come from traumatised families. Their fathers are soldiers, and they’re either dead or absent because they’re deployed far away.

“Some have already run away and are living on the street. Others are experiencing a lot of abuse at home, so they come here to find people they can speak to,” he says.

Recruiting former street children, ex-gang members or survivors of sexual violence to work with young people is key to the centre’s approach. “The most important part is the emotional connection they establish with the youths, which allows for change to take place,” says Peter.