Dances known as Purity Balls are intended to strengthen relationships between daughters and their dads to encourage abstinence until marriage.
(ABC News)
It's Friday night, and teenage girls are full of excitement as they primp for a dance at the local Holiday Inn. But for this group of girls in Sioux Falls, S.D., the night's dream date is not a teenage boy.
"I'm going with my dad instead of a boyfriend," explains 15-year-old Angela Merkle.
She and her two sisters are about to be escorted by their father to what's called a Purity Ball.
The event shares all the hallmarks of a wedding: Vows are exchanged, a white cake is served and there is even a first dance. But at the beginning of the event instead of fathers giving away their daughters' hand, they're holding on tight.
The event's purpose is to celebrate father-daughter bonding, but the main focus of the evening is for the fathers and daughters to exchange pledges in an elaborate ceremony. Fathers vow to protect the girls' chastity until they marry, and the daughters promise to remain abstinent.
"[In] today's day and age, if the daughters are sexually active before they're married that ceremony really is meaningless because the father's not giving anyone away," says Angela's father, Bret Merkle.
"I'm going to stay pure until I'm married and I'm not going to date or kiss a boy," says 12-year-old Sarah Merkle.
"I saw so many young girls get hurt by the whole dating process," her father explains. "People are just chasing after instinct, chasing after their pleasures and desires and that's going to sting in the end."
Thousands of girls have taken purity vows at this kind of event since the first ball was thrown in 1998 by Generations of Light, a popular Christian ministry in Colorado Springs.
Last year, South Dakota's Abstinence Clearinghouse run by Leslee Unruh, a major association of the purity movement, received requests to send out 700 "Purity Ball Planner" booklets.
These balls are the latest trend in the national abstinence movement, which began in the 1980s as a grassroots effort from the Christian community in response to high rates of sexually transmitted diseases.
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