Donington Teen Park equipment marked with racist graffiti

Youngsters who wrote racist graffiti on the side of a skate ramp at Donington Teen Park have been slammed as "totally ignorant".

The graffiti was discovered by a visitor to the park, set up and run by the Flinders Founders youth group, at the weekend.

A comment on social media expressing disappointment over the graffiti was posted on Saturday night and a Flinders Founders committee member removed the offensive words on Sunday, replacing them with the words "respect" and "love".

Margaret Wright, secretary of Flinders Founders, said: "I saw a comment on the Donington Facebook page on Sunday which said that graffiti had been left on equipment at the skate park.

"So I packed up some cleaning materials and a container of water on Sunday which is when I usually go down to the Teen Park to pick up litter.

"When I got there, I was looking for the graffiti but couldn't find it.

"I studied every single piece of artwork at the park and couldn't find anything that was racist.

"Then I thought to look at the benches and the shed, but there was nothing there.

"When I'd finished picking up the litter, I glanced at the skate ramp and noticed a little bit of writing on there.

"There was one word that was about six inches long, with the same word written below it.

"A couple of adults came along later to see if I needed a hand, but I cleaned the words off as best as I could and then wrote 'respect' and 'love' across them."

The Teen Park opened in 2008 and has suffered from occasional bouts of vandalism, such as in October 2019 when a welcome sign worth about £400 was ripped off a lamppost.

Margaret said: "Foul and abusive language, racism and homophobia are despicable and totally unacceptable and we should be doing all we can to combat it.

"There are one or two totally ignorant people who may have seen the Black Lives Matter marches and thought: 'I'll jump on the bandwagon and do something'.

"But it certainly wasn't an older teenager who wrote the graffiti on the skate ramp and I think this sort of language is learned off adults who should know better."