Why ‘chav’ themed socials will always be offensive

There is an odd idea I hear from people from both working and middle class that the concept of a ‘chav’ has nothing to do with class. That, as opposed to being an offensive stereotype, it describes an actual counter-culture of unnecessarily violent and stupid people who live in council estates, not because they’ve been fucked over by the system, but because they’re lazy scroungers who’d prefer to live off benefits more than they’d like to work.

Occasionally you might even get a middle class ‘chav’, apparently, but personally I don’t think dressing up in tracksuit bottoms and hanging around with people far poorer than you will ever actually negate the fact that you’re far better off than them.

We, as working class people have been told to rise above this. We’re given shows like Jeremy Kyle and told to laugh like everyone else at an underclass of ‘disgusting people’ instead of empathise, to subscribe to middle class fashions because that’s ‘society’ and to completely avoid the areas around us where this of working class people live.

I have to admit, I once fully bought into this narrative. I believed, like I had been told, that certain working class people made the rest of us look bad because they were ignorant, bigoted and perhaps even violent. But as I got older it became more and more difficult for me to avoid interacting with people I had thought of as ‘chavs’, and as I ended up talking with people from the communities around me, it became blatantly obvious that it wasn’t them that had been ignorant and bigoted, it was me.

I’m not going to tell anyone what they can and can’t do. If you want to attend a chav social, go ahead. But taking the piss out of people who dress and talk this way continues a narrative regarding ‘chavs’ and creates a negative and damaging view of the working class.

A lot of working class people hate the idea that these socials are offensive to us, and I really empathise with this view. But I can’t help but think it’s not because they aren’t offensive to some people, but instead that you think there’s something wrong with the people they are offensive to and don’t want to be lumped together with them.

Of course not all working class people subscribe to the sub-culture that dresses or talks that way, but we’re all damaged by the idea that there’s something wrong with doing so when the narrative surrounding that kind of lifestyle is that people on benefits are a lazy burden to this country, directly influencing policy which hurts all of us.