Justice & Law Quote by Freda Adler

Adler’s line lands like a courtroom reversal: the act itself is horrific, but the social machinery that follows can be its own second assault. As an educator and criminologist writing in a period when “rape law reform” was still a contested idea, she’s distilling a grim procedural truth into a single, indicting paradox. The intent isn’t poetic. It’s strategic: to make readers feel, instantly, how abnormal it is that a person reporting violence must then defend their credibility, their choices, their clothing, their sobriety, their past.

The subtext is about power, not sex. “Victim becomes the accused” points to the way institutions often treat rape as a story problem to be solved by scrutinizing the complainant, rather than a violence problem to be solved by investigating the accused. It calls out the cultural template that frames rape as a misunderstanding, a seduction gone wrong, a drunken blur - anything but a crime with agency and accountability. The quote also quietly names the asymmetry built into proof: physical evidence can be limited, consent is intimate and contextual, and so the case migrates to character. That migration is where stigma thrives.

Adler’s phrasing is deliberately absolute (“the only crime”) to shock a broader audience into seeing how normalized victim-blaming is. You can debate the literal scope, but the rhetorical move works: it exposes how rape uniquely turns credibility into a battleground, and why reporting can feel like volunteering for cross-examination of your life.