The Internet has been an escape to most of the people who’d like to hide their real persona. There are those who come out of their closet online without having people know what they are in real life. There are those who pretend to be someone else. It’s easy to be anonymous online. But a recent study has it that there’s such a thing called online victimization.

Brendesha Tynes, a teacher for educational psychology, worked along with Michael T. Giang, David R. Williams, and Geneene N. Thompson to see if racial discrimination has anything to do with negative psychological adjustment. From this goal came the categorization of online and offline discrimination.

The team found out that, indeed, online discrimination is part of reality. And the more challenging part of the study they faced was in proving that such a phenomenon causes depression and teen anxiety.

In the study they have made, there were evidences that suggest the presence of anxiety. 71 percent of the African-American teenagers turned out to have been affected with online racial discrimination at least once in their lives. This is just part of the extensive study they did. In the end, they found out that depression or anxiety could creep in to someone who experiences online racial discrimination even just once in their lives.

The results of the study have been officially released in a rationale-type article entitled “Online Racial Discrimination and Psychological Adjustment among Adolescents.”

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