Navy Park in Dunedin, where a 9-year-old girl was racially abused and threatened with a gun by a group of children.

A mother says a group of children put dog faeces on her daughter's face and threatened to shoot her with a fake gun.

Dunedin woman Zahra Muhammed and her three children were at Navy Park in South Dunedin on Sunday when her 9-year-old daughter went to play near bushes.

Muhammed, originally from Canada, and whose children are half Fijian-Indian, noticed about seven children playing in the same area. She could not see any other parents in the area. Most of the group were about 9 years old, apart from two older boys she believed were 12.

"I didn't worry too much about it, I was pushing my youngest on the swing … I kept my eye on it but couldn't really hear or see what was going on and all the kids ended up in the bushes at one stage."

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A short while later her daughter came out of the bushes calling for her and looking upset. She told her the boys had put "poo" on her face.

HAMISH MCNEILLY/STUFF A group of children put dog faeces on a young girl's face and threatened her with a fake gun.

​Muhammed immediately went to the group of children as they came out of the bushes and asked who put the faeces on her daughter.

"Of course they all said 'it wasn't me, we didn't see anything'. My daughter was pointing in the direction of the one that had done it, and he still had poo on his hands.

"I said 'that's unacceptable, we do not do that to people, we now have to cut our trip to the park short and go home [and] that's not fair'. I said 'your parents would be incredibly embarrassed if they knew you were doing this'."

Muhammed put her children in the car and her daughter told her the boys asked her if she was Indian and racially abused her before putting the faeces on her face.

Her daughter told her two of them poked her in the back with sticks, saying they were going to hurt her if she didn't leave. The two older boys pointed a gun at her and told her there were caps in it and they were going to shoot her, Muhammed said.

She told Muhammed she had a feeling the gun was a toy but felt "nervous" they were threatening to shoot her.

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​Muhammed got out of the car. "The two oldest ones had run off the moment I'd approached the group. I went back over to them and said 'you can't threaten to shoot people; and they said 'it wasn't us it was the other boys'."

Muhammed said her daughter had been "really mature" about the incident.

"She actually apologised to me." She said she should have left when the children asked her to leave but instead asked what they were doing and if she could play.

Her daughter told her "maybe I shouldn't have asked so many questions and I should've just left".

"I explained she doesn't have to apologise for being somewhere and remove herself from a public space because she makes other people uncomfortable."

In 2016, Muhammed said she and her children were told by the owner of the charity shop in Oamaru her "sort" weren't welcome.

"We've had the odd thing where people will drive by and call us a terrorist or we had this homeless guy called me Osama Bin Laden.

"Generally speaking Dunedin is amazing, the people are lovely, but the kids have seen little snippets of it so it's not something that's never happened before."