Purity?

"(...) In what is becoming a trend among conservative Christians in the United States, girls as young as nine are pledging to their fathers to remain virgins until they wed, in elaborate ceremonies dubbed "Purity Balls."
The gala affairs are intended to celebrate the father-daughter relationship.
The highlight is when the fathers and daughters exchange vows, with dad signing a covenant to protect his daughter's chastity by living an unblemished life and the daughter promising not to have sex until marriage.
Many fathers at the ceremonies also slip "purity rings" around the finger of their misty-eyed daughters or offer them "chastity bracelets" and other jewelry that the girls can entrust to their husbands on their wedding night.
"The father makes a pledge that he is going to keep his mind pure and be faithful to her mother and there is also a time when there is a conversation about putting the right kinds of things in your mind, such as the father not using pornography," Leslee Unruh, founder of Abstinence Clearinghouse, a leader in the so-called purity movement, told AFP in describing the balls.
She said some 1,400 Purity Balls were held across the United States in 2006, mainly in the south and midwest, and double that number were expected to take place this year.
(...) The popularity of the balls in the United States, especially among evangelical Christians, mirrors the Bush administration's support of abstinence education in US schools. The government's funding for such initiatives has more than doubled in recent years to 206 million dollars (150 million euros).
(...) One study conducted by researchers at the universities of Columbia and Yale found that 88 percent of pledgers wind up having sex before marriage.
"Unfortunately these young people tend, once they start to have sex, to have more partners in a shorter period of time and to use contraception much less than their non-pledging peers," said Debra Hauser, executive vice president at Advocates for Youth, a Washington-based non-profit organization.
"Teens may pledge with the best of intention... and then as they break their pledges they are so shamed and embarrassed that it's unlikely they will go for help.""

In Yahoo! News
Discovered here.