Three quarters of you don’t think chav socials are offensive

This week for AU night, the netball team at Liverpool dressed up as ‘Chavs and Fags‘. Students at Bristol uni previously changed the name of their theme because dressing like a chav is ‘demonising to the working class’, and it’s also happened at Edinburgh. Chav socials are a thing at almost every university.

Questions have been raised over chav socials and how offensive they are, so we conducted a poll to see what you thought of the outfits. We asked: “Do you think these outfits are offensive?” And from over 4,000 respondents, 75 per cent of you said they were not offensive.

The divide is huge, with only 25 per cent of people saying the outfits were offensive. Some who said it was blamed the event for body shaming, with “totally inaccurate misconceptions”, when they joked about having “wide vaginas”. One commenter said: “The idea that chav girls have too much sex whereas non-chav girls are more ‘proper’ and ‘pure’ is just bullshit slut-shaming that’s only gonna propagate the terrible way that women are treated for making their own choices.”

Another said: “As a working class [student] in a middle class university this is actually so offensive. It feels like such a personal dig at many people I know who has this type of lifestyle, we are all different and we should 100 per cent embrace but not by making a mockery of others.”

Some however said by labelling this as offensive to working class people, it means every working class person is a chav. “You are not demonising the working class by dressing as a chav or a scallie, that’s just a sub-culture in itself, not all people from that background dress like that and it’s even more offensive to insinuate otherwise.”

Another said: “Chavs aren’t just working class. I see quite a few chavs who are quite well off and some who have very little. It’s more about how you speak/dress, not what class you are.”