(I find the term "Statutory rape" quite misleading. It is definitely not the same thing as plain rape, or worse, child rape. It looks like it has been pushed by

(I find the term "Statutory rape" quite misleading. It is definitely not the same thing as plain rape, or worse, child rape. It looks like it has been pushed by a lobby of afraid, protective, conservative, possibly religious parents.) One of the saddest things I can remember (though, unfortunately, the details escape me due to time) was a couple of rape cases that occurred in the US maybe a decade or so ago. One was a case of a very violent rape where the sentence was something on the order of 15 years. The other was a case of statutory with a fully consenting 16- or 17-year old where the sentence was something closer to 40 years. I was pretty young at the time (if it was a decade exactly I would have been 12), but that's definitely when I first realised that the "won't somebody please think of the children" arguments are bullshit.