Jelly bracelets first became popular in the 1980s, as they were worn by pop stars such as Madonna.

They are a casual and trendy style of jewelry, usually rings of rubbery plastic. Colors vary, and some are translucent.

Although many teenagers wear them to be fashionable, some use them to play a game called "snap," in which the bracelet becomes a "sex coupon," and the color symbolizes the sex act that the wearer must perform if someone breaks the bracelet.

According to www.sex-bracelets.com, "Jelly bracelets are in fashion and worn by people of all ages, both male and female. However, it is college students and twenty-somethings who wear them as 'sex bracelets,' not usually younger people."

Y-Press recently interviewed a group of students to see if jelly bracelets have a sexual connotation at their schools or if that connotation is simply a media myth. The students were Daniel Day, 16, a sophomore at Lawrence North High School; Katie Finch, 12, a sixth-grader at Raymond Park Middle School; Shelby Jenkins, a sixth-grader at Stonybrook Middle School; and Devney Hamilton, 14, an eighth-grader at Zionsville Middle School.

Only Katie and Shelby were familiar with the sexual meaning of jelly bracelets.

"I didn't really know anything until my friend told me, and then she just gave me one," Shelby said. "And when she told me what they were for, then I just stopped wearing it."

Katie knew of one girl who reportedly played "snap" with her boyfriend. She said her school -- Raymond Park -- has banned the bracelets. "If you get caught wearing a jelly bracelet, you have to go to the main principal. (The administration) takes them away, and sometimes they also call your parents," she explained.

Jelly bracelets have been causing controversy across the country in recent months, and like Raymond Park, many schools have banned them. These students say such prohibitions are misguided.

"I think mostly it's adults being more paranoid than really what the threat is," Daniel said. "I don't think most of the kids who are wearing those really use them to indicate these sexual things. I think it's just parents, you know, getting scared and not wanting their kids to participate in those things."

Devney agreed. "I think they're kind of unreasonable because it's not gonna solve any problems."

Most schools try to prevent students from baring too much skin, such as by banning short skirts and tank tops on girls and sagging pants on boys. But others go further: This spring, the Merrillville school district banned pink clothing and accessories at its middle schools and high school out of concern that the color was associated with gang activity.

The students agreed that some kind of code is necessary "because what you wear to school, everybody has to look at it," Devney said.

But she added that some rules are unnecessary. For example, Zionsville Middle School recently banned flip-flops, but "everybody wears them to school. When a dress code is too strict, I think you're asking for kids to push the limit," she said.

Daniel said dress is simply a form of expression, and too many restrictions "infringes on your rights because whatever you wear, you choose what meaning is behind it. And if you're wearing these bracelets, and they're just being worn, then there's nothing wrong with it."

Besides, he said, strict dress codes are ineffective. "I think school administrators are kind of missing the point when they ban articles of clothing because those are just like symbols of activities, but they're not really getting to the root of the problem. (With) the pink (color) thing, what they're trying to prevent is gang activity, but really that's not gonna happen just if you ban pink (clothing) because the gang could change its color to purple or something."

While some schools try to take responsibility for what students wear, shouldn't it really be the parents' job? Katie and Shelby say their parents always make sure they're dressed properly.

"If we wear anything bad that my parents don't want us to wear, they wouldn't let us go to school or go out," Katie said. "They would make us change into something else."

Likewise, Shelby's parents watch what she wears. "If I take out something and I ask them if I can wear it to school, they'll choose if I should wear it or not," she said.

Although the students disagree with strict dress-code policies in school, they do agree that you need such policies in employment or religious settings.

"What people wear really sets the environment a lot, and for the church and business environments, you don't want to have people worrying about what they're wearing," Devney explains. "It's up to them to be able to set what kind of environment they want to have."

While these students would like to believe that dress is just a form of expression, they realize they are often stereotyped by what they wear.

"No matter whether you want it to or not, what you wear is the first thing people know about you," Devney explains. "That's what you know first about them, and then when you get to know them, you don't notice what they wear."

ASSISTANT EDITORS: Katie Ciresi, 14; Chelsea McClellan, 14.

REPORTERS: Mallory Jones, 13; Katie Stergar, 12; Abbey Stokes, 13.

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Y-Press is a nonprofit news organization with offices in The Indianapolis Star building. Stories are researched, reported and written by teams of young people ages 10 to 18. For more information, call (317) 444-2010 or send an e-mail to ypress@in.net.

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