Sarah Williams was taking her usual weekend drama class for eight and
nine-year-olds when she noticed that one girl, a sweet, well-mannered child,
was wearing a wristful of prettily coloured jelly bracelets. “If a boy snaps
the yellow one you have to give him a hug,” said the girl. “Oh,” said
teacher, trying to show an interest, “and what about that blue one?” The
little girl leant to whisper in her ear: “That means you have to give him
oral sex.”
This is not the teacher’s real name but it is a true story. It is one of
several similar tales I have heard around the country while researching the
phenomenon of “shag bands” — the playground craze for wearing bracelets of
different colours that are supposed to signify escalating grades of sexual
activity up to full coitus (that’s the black bracelet, by the way).
Many parents are horrified that, even if children don’t understand what such
terms mean, primary school pupils as young as 8 are using explicit sexual
terminology because of a fashion fad. Some schools have already banned the
bracelets amid lurid newspaper headlines such as “Bracelet which means your
child is having SEX” (The Sun). The Wakefield MP Mary Creagh
has demanded that “shag bands” be withdrawn from sale in Poundworld and has
raised the issue with Ed Balls, the Children’s Secretary. “This is about the
coarsening and cheapening of childhood,” she says. “Our precious children
should not be exposed to this kind of stupidity for commercial profit.”
It is certainly ugly. But should we keep some perspective? Sexually charged
playground crazes are nothing new. Kiss chase did not, admittedly, carry
quite the same level of concern as a game that may, in theory, end with one
small child saying to another “flash your tits” (pink bracelet) and much
(much) worse, but there is a risk that banning such bracelets may make them
seem even “cooler”. One teacher on the Times Educational
Supplement website writes: “They are bracelets — nothing more, nothing
less. If the kids wearing them want to attach silly labels to them, let
them. I very much doubt they actually act on it.”
Some children certainly seem to think that adults are becoming unnecessarily
hysterical. “Kids aren’t that stupid,” a 12-year-old girl told me. “No one
is soft enough to think that you really have to do it. It’s just a laugh, a
fashion thing.”
Anyone who cares to look up the meanings of the bands on the internet, as any
child is free to, will not, however, see it as much of a laugh. Some of the
practices described may shock even the broadest of minds (look up the
meaning of the brown band if you doubt it). There are not many playground
crazes that have websites spelling out sexual fetishes in graphic detail.
Mary Creagh, who was alerted to the bands by a concerned mother, says that
the fad is pernicious, contributing to the normalisation of sexual activity
among young pupils and increasing the pressure on girls to have underage
sex.
“There is nothing intrinsically wrong with plastic bracelets — you can’t ban
plastic bands — but there is something offensive about packaging and
marketing something as a ‘shag band’ and having it on sale unrestricted,”
she says. “The last time I looked, shagging was illegal under the age of 16
— so why are they on sale in Poundworld and other shops?” She argues that
parents and teachers have a duty to protect children from crazes of a sexual
nature that have internet websites and forums. “The internet is a place for
predatory paedophiles,” she says.
She knows of a school in Manchester where every pupil in a class of
12-year-olds was found to be wearing one. They were confiscated and letters
sent to parents.
Shannel Johnson, from Sheffield, was featured in her local newspaper after
being appalled when her daughter Harleigh, 8, came home wearing the
bracelets. Harleigh told her mother: “If they snap, I have to make a baby
with a boy.” Shannel said: “When I googled them, I discovered a site selling
them and giving explicit detail about what each colour represents. There’s
also a Facebook group asking people which colour is their favourite and why.
Most comments are from under-18s, which worries me.”
Many of the comments, however, suggest that most children do not take the
sexual labels seriously. One girl writes: “They got banned in loads of
places and my school got letters sent home about them and if the
headmistress spots any they are confiscated. We didn’t do anything that they
meant, we only liked the colours and messed around but adults went 2 far and
banned them :( ” I spoke to one girl of 11 who laughed off the idea that any
girl would act on the supposed meanings of the bands. “She might give him a
hug or a kiss but anything more than that and she would just say ‘get
lost’,” she says.
The concept of the “shag band” is not entirely new. Some will remember similar
bracelets being around in the Eighties and Nineties (in the early days they
were popularised by Madonna) and that in some schools they were known as
“f*** me” bracelets. In America they are called “snopes” — and on snopes.com
there is an article pointing out that there is nothing new about young
people inventing “sex coupons”. In the 1970s, pull tabs from cans and labels
from beer bottles were imbued with sexually redeemable value in some areas.
Should we not just wait for this latest trend to die out?
Emma Citron, a consultant clinical psychologist specialising in child and teen
development, says that the bands should be banned. Even though she agrees
that the bracelets may be worn largely out of bravado, she believes that
they give children a “false sense” of what their peers are doing sexually
and will lead some to “go farther than they are comfortable with”.
“Young people don’t suspect that the person next to them may be lying and they
may think, ‘Oh, I’d better move on to green’, or whatever,” she says. “It
sets up a false progression of what is meant to happen and inappropriate
inevitability about the sexual aspects of relationships.
“They really ought to be banned. Let’s imagine for a moment if the same system
was applied to drugs — ‘Have you tried marijuana? Now try cocaine’. It is
commercial exploitation of children.”
She disagrees that it can be compared to a traditional playground game such as
kiss chase. “With kiss chase you get what you see,” she says — “a peck on
the cheek or, if you’re lucky, on the lips. It’s sweet and innocent and all
part of growing up. [‘Shag bands’] are something else altogether.”
Carmarthenshire County Council, in Wales, has moved to ban the bracelets,
which sell for as little as 75p for a pack of six. Gwynne Wooldridge, a
councillor, says: “Wearing these plastic bracelets may seem to be innocent
fashion fun but they are a shocking new craze. I’m sure most parents would
be horrified to learn how they can lead to this promiscuous behaviour.
“We are advising all schools that under no circumstances should these bands be
allowed. Some schools have already acted to stop the practice and we expect
all the others to follow.”
Mary Creagh has not yet heard back from Ed Balls but she believes that he
needs to give national guidance to schools to make them aware of the
bracelets, so that they can respond appropriately.
“Mothers of the country need to rise up against this,” she says. “Children are
being vulgarised and brutalised by inappropriate sexual knowledge at too
early an age.”
The drama teacher, meanwhile, told the child never to repeat that phrase again
and informed her parents.
Another teacher, writing on a teachers’ internet forum, reveals that a more
counterintuitive tack has been taken at his school. “We do confiscate the
bracelets,” he writes. “However, one teacher had the bright idea of wearing
them herself instead of just putting them in her desk. The pupils in the
upper school ceased wearing them immediately.”
Dangerous games
The age-old game of kiss chase was banned at an infant school in Luton in
1999. Teachers at Cheynes Infant School said that it encouraged
inappropriate behaviour among the pupils, and the “exchange of body fluids”
was a potential health hazard.
In 2003 the Government banned a toy for the first time in 11 years. Up to five
million Yo-Balls had been sold in Britain before they were found to pose a
risk of strangulation. The Yo-Ball (pictured above) consisted of a weighted
plastic ball filled with liquid, attached to a length of rubber, which was
bounced from the hand like a yo-yo — but children had taken to swinging the
balls around their heads, causing a risk of the string becoming wrapped
tightly around the neck. Parents were advised to destroy the toy or return
it to the shop from which it was bought.
In 2005, the Royal College of Nursing reported a new phenomenon known as
“daisy chaining” that involved teenagers in London. The game had little to
do with making necklaces from flowers: it meant groups of youngsters going
to one another’s homes to have group sex.
For years, children have experimented with passing out. In 2008 a Kent
schoolboy was taken to hospital after holding his breath for more than a
minute before blacking out. Other versions of “the fainting game” include
holding a “player” against a wall by the neck until he loses consciousness.
In April this year, videos posted online showed children snorting crushed-up
sweets and sherbet (above) . In one film, a boy did a “line” of crushed
Refreshers on his exercise book. A mother in Maidstone, Kent, said that her
13-year-old son had foam coming out of his nose after snorting ten Love
Hearts. Doctors warned that the craze could be fatal, as children could
inhale the powder into the windpipe and choke.
Chloe Lambert
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