(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.