One philosophy includes the standardization of treatment for victims and a view of victims as helpless and passive people, needing professionally defined solutions. Such a philosophy concentrates on the legal and medical services victims require. The second philosophy views victims as having only temporarily lost control over their body and needing help to regain their assertiveness. This philosophy sees women as capable of making decisions about recovery and of taking charge of defense against other attacks. We hypothesized that whether an agency held one or the other of these philosophies is contingent upon the agency's niche in the service delivery system of a community, particularly whether it tends to see victims within 24 hours after the assault or later. On the basis of interview with 37 agency directors or heads of sexual assault programs in agencies, we found that the timing of first contract with victims was correlated with the type of services the agency offers and to its embedment in the community. Not strongly correlated with philosophy were the standardization of treatment and the perception that clients' problems were not similar. Multiple regression analysis showed that timing and the concentration of financial resources (not themselves strongly related) best predicted an agency's philosophy of service. (Author abstract)