It is only a band of silver, imprinted with a Bible verse, worn by a schoolgirl.
But the decision by one of the country's top state schools to ban American-style 'purity rings' - increasingly worn by Christian teenagers to symbolise a pledge not to have sex before marriage - has prompted not just a standoff with local parents, but a debate over religious expression and sex education.
According to the aLondon Observer--Heather and Philip Playfoot have spent almost two years in dispute with Millais School in Horsham, West Sussex, over their 15-year-old daughter Lydia's ring. While the school's uniform rules forbid jewellery, they argue that the rings - given to teenagers who complete a controversial evangelical church course preaching sexual abstinence - hold genuine religious significance.
'The ring is a reminder to them of the promise they have made, much the same as a wedding ring is an outward sign of an inward promise,' said Heather Playfoot.
'There are Muslim girls in the school who are allowed to wear the headcovering, although that isn't part of the school uniform, and Sikh girls who are allowed the wear the bangle although that isn't part of the uniform. It's a discriminatory policy.
'We don't want her education to be disrupted because of it but we do want her to feel free to wear something that is very significant.'
The family claim that Lydia and up to a dozen other pupils wearing purity rings have been forced to take lessons in isolation as punishment for breaking the rules, threatened with detention and that - in Lydia's case - the school governors intimated she could be expelled for repeatedly defying the rules. Heather Playfoot said the school had told them it was a health and safety issue.
Lydia has now stopped wearing the ring in school. 'It makes me feel quite upset and angry as well, and in a way betrayed a little, because the school are always teaching us to be safe and we are trying to stand up for something,' she told The Observer. 'We get picked on and called out of lessons to see if we have got [the rings] on. I do actually keep to the school rules and I don't like stepping out of line or anything, but I just think this is really unfair.'
Her ring came from the Silver Ring Thing, an evangelical initiative recently introduced to Britain from the US, with which her parents' local church is involved.
The organisation is highly controversial, with some experts arguing that abstinence pledges are actually less effective than conventional sexual education which advocates teenagers waiting until they are ready, but emphasises safe sex.
Silver Ring Thing is critical of contraception, suggesting it is dangerously fallible - which critics say only encourages teenagers who do break their pledges to have unprotected sex.
The Playfoots however are equally critical of standard sex education. 'Here you have 12 girls who want to live an alternative lifestyle: we are not asking the school to subscribe to it, just respect it,' said Heather Playfoot.
The issue has now been taken up by the Tory MP Andrew Selous, chair of the Conservative Christian Fellowship, who raised the wearing of purity rings with the Schools Minister Jim Knight in the House of Commons last week.
Knight told him in a written parliamentary answer that while school governors had freedom to set uniform rules, government guidance states that they 'should have regard to their responsibilities under equalities legislation' and be 'sensitive to pupils' cultural and religious needs'.
Selous said while many schools banned jewellery he did not see a problem with purity rings, adding: 'Given that the government is failing to avchieve its teenage pregnancy targets, you would have thought that schools would do everything in their power to help children help themselves.'
However Keith Porteous Wood of the National Secular Society defended the school, adding: 'If the school has the uniform policy I don't see why it should make an exception for this. I'm deeply distrustful of these Silver Ring Thing-type initiatives: the research is quite clear that they don't work.'
Leon Nettley, headmaster of the Millais School, said in a statement that the school's own sex education programme already stressed the illegality of underage sex and encouraged pupils to discuss the issues, adding: 'In relation to the issue of wearing a purity ring, the school is not convinced that pupils' rights have been interfered with by the application of the school's uniform policy.'
The abstinence debate
Hundreds of British teenagers are thought to have gone through courses organised by the Silver Ring Thing, created a decade ago by two Christian activists in Arizona as a response to rising teenage pregnancies. It promotes abstinence before marriage and sexual fidelity within it, using Bible teachings and DVD clips to emphasise the horrors of sexually transmitted diseases and abortions.
At the end of the course, children prepared to pledge chastity can pay £10 for a silver purity ring to be given to their spouse on their wedding day: even non-virgins can be 'born again'.
US President George Bush has heavily advocated abstinence teaching, budgeting $170 million a year for it. However, research by Columbia and Yale Universities found while those who pledge chastity may delay first sex, 88 per cent of them eventually break the promise, and are then less likely than non-pledgers to use contraception.
A MORI poll for The Observer found a fifth of British teenagers had had underage sex. The average age of losing virginity was 17. Almost a third of women questioned wished they had waited longer
