It's still unclear exactly what happened, but 13 hours after a schoolyard brawl during recess, year 9 student Jai Morcom was pronounced dead on August 30.
A few days later, more than 1000 people, including his classmates from Mullumbimby High School in Northern NSW, marched for peace and for Jai, and released balloons.
On September 3, a group of between seven and 10 young teenage women drove into a school in Ipswich, Queensland. They allegedly carried knives and were hunting a number of students.
The following week at Airds High School in Sydney's south-west three male students were assaulted, one had his nose broken.
The list goes on.
The enduring question raised in the aftermath of the horror of Jai's death is an obvious one: how did this happen? The frequency of similar incidents should lead us all to ask: why is this happening?
When something like this happens, here, in a country that thought it could always say "only in America" — people start grappling for an explanation.
The letters pages and online comment pages are littered with attacks blaming young people as a group.
We're told we have no self-discipline, we're not dealt enough discipline, we've no respect for authority, we watch too much violent TV, play too many violent video games, we're "young thugs", we have it too easy, we don't work hard enough, we don't know right from wrong.
I remember my own public school in Queensland, a 1500-strong colony segregated into groups, gangs, cliques and people united only by their exclusion.
There were the jocks, the bikers (BMX, of course), the Islander kids, the nerds and their compatriots in the school orchestra, the "fat" kids (any shape other than average was fair game), the library geeks, the goths, emos, metal-heads — segregation, racism, sexism, homophobia, we had it all.
The biggest peacekeeper at my old stomping ground was the size of the place, and the relative affluence of the area. Every different group at least had its own space, and the kids from truly broken homes were a minority. Go out a few suburbs and it was more like a demilitarised zone.
Like most schools, bullying happened, and there was a social hierarchy of bullying. A few years out of school and the bizarre divisions disappear, and we're slotted into the general strata of capitalist society.
As young people we're called lots of things and we're told lots of things. But rarely are we asked what the problem is.
Bureaucracies create anti-bullying strategies. Underpaid teachers at understaffed schools implement them. But the bullying continues.
Sometimes the bullies are suspended, sometimes they're expelled, who knows how many of them and their victims later take their rage out on themselves with drugs and dropping out altogether.
Psychologists and academics write papers about why young people are so pissed off — so disempowered, disenfranchised and alienated.
Politicians and media commentators call for tougher rules, tougher sentences, "individual responsibility" — as if the system we grow up in bears no responsibility at all.
The truth is, as time goes by, year in year out, it's not getting easier to be young in Australia.
Meanwhile youth culture — our music, our subcultures, crazy hairstyles, piercings, rebellion! — the only things that keep us sane — they're getting ripped away from us, re-labelled, sterilised, commodified, and sold back to us through a TV screen.
And if we don't fit into the commercial stereotypes shoved down our throats, we're made to feel like lesser beings. And if we do fit into the stereotypes, we either eventually figure out what a big lie it all is, or we get lost in the system, for better or for worse.
Schools are getting scarier because the world is getting scarier. Climate change is worsening rapidly and threatens life on the planet, while governments and greedy corporations ignore the appeals from climate scientists to change course.
For most young people today the future is uncertain. The dangers of peak oil, food shortages, deeper droughts, rising tides, wars over scarce resources, economic chaos, climate refugees, extreme weather events and runaway warming are looming unless fundamental social changes are made.
Yet the messages we hear from politicians and the corporate press tell us everything is okay, when clearly it just isn't.
Who can be surprised that such an anti-social system — a system that puts profits before people and the planet — provokes cases of anti-social behaviour in young people today?
The students of Airds High School in Sydney, like the Mullumbimby students, are planning a protest against the violence in their school. Resistance stands with them in their courage.
We support all students that want to organise for their rights and that demand a school system that promotes the full development of each individual's potential.
Resistance is about young people standing together, fighting for the better world we all deserve, and recognising that we all have far more in common than we have differences.
Resistance is about young people — who have always been the first to call bullshit on the system — making a society where social segregation isn't the norm, where exclusion isn't accepted, and where young people's voices are heard.
[Ewan Saunders is an organiser of the Brisbane branch of Resistance.]