Elijah* tried to keep out of trouble when he got out of lock up. A new path seemed within reach but he was torn. “It was so mixed feelings,” he recalls. “I wanted to change my life but I had a bunch of stuff on me … it was like two things fighting at once.”
Within weeks, the teenager, who had previously been swept up in burglaries, had joined one of Melbourne’s youth gangs. Things escalated from there.
The stabbing deaths of 15-year-old Dau Akueng and 12-year-old Chol Achiek in Melbourne’s west earlier this month have fuelled debate about knife crime and youth offending in Victoria.
Youth crime is nothing new, but people working with young offenders in the state say the nature of offending has changed. Crime prevention programs say they are frequently referred children whose offences include carjacking, aggravated burglaries and carrying weapons.
Children comprised 1,128 of the 5,400 serial repeat offenders responsible for 40% of crime in Victoria last financial year, police said this week. The youth offenders were arrested a combined 7,118 times.
Victoria police have charged eight teenagers with murder over the deaths of Dau and Chol.
Dau Akueng and Chol Achiek were allegedly murdered in Cobblebank in Melbourne’s outer west. Composite: Gofundme/
Elijah, 17, credits enrolling in an alternative education school for students who have disengaged from mainstream education for helping him choose a different path.
“If it wasn’t for the school, then I probably would be locked up again or dead,” he says.
“This school is gangster. They look after you, they feed you. They actually check on you.”
If he comes to school feeling sad, Elijah says his teachers know what to do: “They’ll just leave me alone or I can sit on the bean bag and listen to music,” he says.
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“There’s no point of being disrespectful. If they’re looking after you, feeding you, treating you with respect, there’s no bad in the school.”
Along with attending this school, which supported him through numerous stints in custody over the past few years, Elijah says he has increasingly turned to his Christian faith. Recently, he stopped carrying weapons.
“Even though I want to carry a sword, or I want to … do a lot of things, I don’t do it,” he says.
“I started relying more on Jesus. It took away … a lot of pressure on myself and it made me feel … just happy in general.”
He used to always carry a sword or knife – whatever he could fit in his pants. Sometimes he would even carry a weapon to church. It was often a safety measure, he says, because other people “hated” him.
“I’m not gonna … sit down and watch people come to me with a knife.”
Victoria has banned machetes but frontline workers in crime prevention programs say young people repeatedly tell them they carry weapons because they are scared or feel as if they have no other choice.
Elijah’s classmate, Kenji* says he has also carried weapons for protection.
After the deaths of Dau Akueng and Chol Achiek he fears for his safety.
“I feel like it could happen to me as well,” he says.
“Because it’s happening to a lot of people out there, innocent people as well,” he says.
When his mother saw a video about what happened to Chol she was “crying even though she didn’t even know who he was”.
Having finished a diversion order for numerous violent offences, which involved attending meetings including with a youth worker and mental health service, and not offending for 12 months, Elijah is about to begin a pre-apprenticeship.
He says disputes between young boys can begin as a petty rift, often over girls, that then spiral into violence.
Roadside memorials in Melbourne’s Cobblebank, where Dau Akueng, 15, and Chol Achiek, 12 were killed. Photograph: Sean Davey/The Guardian
“It’s even for the fame … people don’t do it to get rich and then spoil their families. People do it to get rich and then … get girls,” he says.
Kenji says conflict between groups can start online.
“Talking to someone over the internet … it just causes problems. It could be the root of some problems with gangs,” he says. “A lot of people die over online stuff.”
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Youth Support and Advocacy Services crime prevention manager Navin Dhillon says his organisation’s early intervention crime programs are increasingly seeing referrals for more complex alleged offending and for children as young as 12.
Dhillon is hopeful of turning children’s lives around because the advocacy service is often the first one to work with these young people.
“We’re able to get in quite efficiently and quite effectively to try and divert them,” he says.
Victoria’s children’s commissioner, Meena Singh, says it can be difficult for people to understand that some young offenders – increasingly pilloried as emblematic of a crisis in the state – were themselves victims of violence.
Conflicts between gangs are at the heart of some of the violence. A bail decision published in June for a 17-year-old charged with an alleged murder of an 18-year-old involving machetes, is one example.
Police allege that over the space of seven weeks the conflict between two gangs led to the father of the accused being held at gunpoint during a home invasion, a non-fatal beating and stabbing with a machete, and the release of a rap music video in which the victim’s gang taunted their rivals.
Police believe the alleged murder was retribution for the music video.
Pat Boyle, a former Victoria Police detective superintendent who left the force in 2022, says he has tried many times to change the approach to youth gangs, and the state’s failure to do so means the problem has become far worse than he could have imagined.
Boyle researched the state’s youth gangs as part of a Churchill Fellowship, which included speaking with police in Europe and North America. He found that including health, education and social service providers in solutions was vital to driving down crime.
He says Scottish authorities, for example, looked closely at the foster homes youth offenders had been sent to and found that some children were preyed upon by neighbouring crooks or pedophiles, speeding up the cycle of reoffending.
The Victoria police youth gang strategy for 2023-26 says gang members, motivated by status, commit violent crimes, such as robberies and assaults.
In Victoria, the state’s most vulnerable children in child protection and who have contact with the youth justice system – often referred to as “crossover kids” – are at a greater risk of being charged with offences, Sentencing Council research has found.
Singh says young people involved in the child protection system are over represented as victims of youth violence and as youth offenders.
The commissioner for Aboriginal children and young people, Meena Singh, says discussions about how to reduce youth crime rarely include young people. Photograph: Diego Fedele/AAP
Singh says children in care are “so misunderstood”.
“The circumstances of those kids’ lives have led to the government saying ‘we can be a better parent’, but what’s happened after that is an overrepresentation in criminal offending,” she says.
Victoria’s Commission for Children and Young People is working on an inquiry into the experiences of people who were aged between 10 and 13 when they first came in contact with the criminal justice system.
Singh says the initial findings were not surprising, reiterating that discussions about how to reduce youth crime too often failed to hear from the young people involved in criminal offending.
“We just need to get the basics right for young people: safety at home, responding to their health needs, mental and physical, supporting their education needs,” she says.
Elijah has his eyes set on his pre-apprenticeship and leaving behind the violent offending he says he grew up with.
He remains friends with the boys in the gang he joined after his release from youth detention. Having spent time homeless together, these boys are bonded by a brotherhood.
“We’ve made money together. I starved with them. We’ve ate together. I can’t let go. I wouldn’t.”
*Names have been changed
