Okay thank you for clarifying.
Is there a reason why many written texts do not spell out the importance of consent or the crime of sexual assault?
It's unusual in Christian tradition from my experience to emphasize the importance of consent based on religious teachings and/or doctrinal support. So, because of my own experience, I am wanting to open the question to all religious adherents, but personally I'd also like to know what you see within Judaism and it's teachings.
Well, in general, I think it's helpful to remember that the Written Torah was never intended to stand alone. The Oral Torah is part of the whole package.
Think of it this way. If you open a volume of a Federal or State legal code (and I think this is also true for British laws and other Commonwealth systems descended from British law), you find with each law a heading offering a basic gist of the content of the law, and then sections (each with its own heading), and each section is then divided into subsections. Usually, if one wants to understand a certain law, one looks it up, studies all the sections and subsections, and then consults in separate volumes material to shed light on the law, such as the analysis of legislative and judicial experts, and legal precedents from relevant court cases. Only in this fashion can one understand what how the law is to be understood, how it is supposed to be applied, and how it functions within society and the courtroom.
When we look only at the Written Torah, it's like looking at the law heading and some of the section headings, but not seeing the enumerated subsections, or court precedents, or analyses. All those latter things are found in the Oral Torah. Because the two are parts of the same whole, it isn't odd that significant details aren't found in the Written Torah-- they just go someplace else. I hope that makes some sort of sense.
In any case, as to doctrinal support, we reason out the primary prohibition against rape from the fact that the Written Torah explicitly prohibits rape. The punishments for rape, classically, are essentially just the punishments for physical assault, plus extra penalties. The need for consent is spelled out several places in the Talmud and early post-Talmudic halachic (Jewish legal) literature, that's fairly basic. One of the places in Written Torah they cite as a prooftext is in Genesis, in the story of Abraham's servant seeking a wife for Abraham's son Isaac, where the servant has gone back to Abraham's family still dwelling in Aram, and asked for the hand of Rebecca to be Isaac's wife. They ask her directly, "Will you go with this man?" And she answers, "I will go." From this, the Rabbis conclude that a woman must give verbal consent to marriage. Verbal consent for sex is a modern refinement of this idea, since of course the Rabbis were presuming that one was not having sex outside of marriage (or concubinage, which was licit in those days).
Of course, we have not actually had halachic courts with criminal jurisdiction in hundreds of years, so these days, we don't interpret criminal law for practical application. In most non-ritual matters-- criminal matters included-- we cede jurisdiction to the civil courts. But a number of rabbis have published halachic responsa today highlighting the egregious nature of rape and singling it out especially for its psychologically traumatic nature. This is based in part on the classical Hebrew word for rape, which is related closely to the word for torment.
