South Sudanese youths are 95 times more likely to be in custody in Victoria than non-South Sudanese young people, according to a new report.
The South Sudanese Australian Youth Justice Expert Working Group also found that in 2024-25 South Sudanese children and young people made up 22% of those aged 10 to 24 in custody, despite being just 0.4% of the population. For all African backgrounds the figure was 50% in 2024.
Melbourne has been ravaged by African gang violence for almost two decades, beginning when former Liberal immigration minister Amanda Vanstone brought in 10,000 Sudanese refugees in 2007.
The crime wave sparked community anger, but in 2018 Victoria Police and the left-wing corporate media responded by denying that African gangs existed and stopped releasing the statistics on the nationality of offenders.
Earlier this year police admitted there were dozens of gangs with thousands of members after a series of shocking alleged African gang murders, machete attacks and shootings.
But the report stated that the over-representation of South Sudanese youths in custody was due to “key structural drivers” including “forced displacement, trauma, intergenerational disruption, racism, economic hardship and barriers to citizenship”
“These are compounded by systemic bias and discrimination in policing, schools and other service systems,” the report stated.
A section of the report also claimed that young South Sudanese people were being “groomed” and “exploited” by organised criminals.
The report was commissioned by former premier Dan Andrews in 2022 and handed to Jacinta Allan’s Labor government in December 2025, but was only publicly released last week.
It contained 59 recommendations, including the establishment of community hubs, the implementation of restorative justice processes and the countering of “harmful stereotypes in media”.
The report also suggested police appoint South Sudanese people as community liaison officers and create dedicated leadership roles, give officers cultural awareness training, embed cultural advice in policies, and implement “anti‑racism actions”.
Expert Working Group Chair Dr Santino Atem Deng said the over-representation of South Sudanese youth in custody was a crisis, and that the whole state needed to work together to solve it.
“These figures demand urgent, coordinated action from the Victorian Government and the wider community,” he wrote in the report.
“This crisis requires coordinated action across the community, government and service systems. It calls for compassion, urgency and care from all Victorians.”
The report noted that according to the 2021 Census there were 13,532 individuals with South Sudanese heritage in Victoria, but that community members believed the actual population was as high as 30,000.
“There is a significant likelihood that government and service data underestimates the total number of South Sudanese Australian community members in Victoria,” the report stated.
“Data that identifies people by country of birth can miss counting people from the South Sudanese Australian community who were born in Australia, or in a third country (many families spent long periods in refugee resettlement camps elsewhere in Africa before arriving in Australia).”
Header image: Left, an African gang member with a machete at a Melbourne shopping centre. Right, Ater Good, a Sudanese gang member who was allegedly shot dead in January (supplied).
