A victim of rape immediately feels an acute disruption of her lifestyle and coping skills and a great stress on her ego. In order to achieve long-term integration, she must resolve a lack of trust of men, paranoia about her physical safety, guilt, and a grief reaction. Rape crisis centers, offering extensive support and education for rape victims within a peer framework rather than under the rubric of mental health or psychiatry, seems to meet the needs of many women. The psychodynamic therapy approach, appearing to assume victim precipitation, is expensive, time-consuming, and ineffective for most people. Another approach, traditional humanistic therapy, also encourages empathy with the assailant through role playing in psychodrama. Although the group format is helpful, the victim's mistaken expectations of recovery often leads to an increase in anxiety and guilt. Existential and growth models are similar to the humanistic model, and behavioral-cognitive therapy, although providing symptomatic relief for the rape victim, has yet to be reported as systemetically effective. A discussion of the crisis therapy model notes that the rape victim undergoes a succession of crisis and adoptive phases during which she becomes increasingly able to handle stress. Important factors in the victim's recuperation period are symptom relief and the support of significant others. A proposed model for measuring the rape victim's progress consists of a numbered scale of adaptive behavior in which she can advance from the first stage--acute disorganization--to higher levels of behavior. The scale would provide a method of quantifying the rape victim's uneven recovery rate. Treatment modalities for each stage of the victim's recuperation can also be compared for effectiveness. Nineteen footnotes are provided.