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By Sadie Nicholas
Daily Mail
They are thin, plastic bracelets, the kind of innocent-looking friendship bands that schoolgirls like to wear.
Available in a variety of colours and cheap enough to be bought with pocket money, they have become an overnight sensation in primary school playgrounds across the country.
But it is their name that causes alarm bells to ring: Shag-bands. And they are worn by children far too young to truly understand what that crude term means.
'... different colours mean different things'
"I couldn't believe it when my son told me what the bands are called," says Donna Heaton, whose eight-year-old son, Sam, asked her for 20p to buy one from a schoolfriend at his state school last week.
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"I was horrified. He doesn't even know what that word means. Apparently, he and his friends at school are using the bands to facilitate kissing, a bit like kiss chase.
"But I've since discovered through other concerned parents that the different colours mean different things."
Alarmingly, these seemingly innocuous bracelets have been linked to gradations of sexual behaviour. Each colour denotes a physical act, from a hug or a kiss to showing body parts, to other acts that would make many adults blush.
If someone breaks the band off the wearer's wrist, the wearer supposedly has to offer the physical act that corresponds to the colour of the band.
'There are far worse things going on in playgrounds'
A gold band entitles anyone able to snap it off to all of the sexual favours represented by the other bands.
Accountant Anna Kite had no idea that the bands being worn by her seven-year-old daughter, Holly, meant anything until another concerned mother in her home town of Horley, Surrey, phoned her.
"According to her son, he'd snapped a pink one from a girl's wrist at school that day, which meant she was supposed to show him her naked chest.
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