( utilitymonstermash and funereal-disease both asked why relationships between, say, two fifteen year olds wouldn’t also be consent violations. This answer answers their question too, I think.)
The research on this is older and less comprehensive as I would like it to be, but in relationships where the younger participant is under 18 and the older participant is at least four years older (aka statutory rape in most states) the younger partner statistically has worse outcomes than a person of the same age dating someone their own age - more likely to drop out of school, more likely to abuse drugs and alcohol, has more STIs, and is more likely to get pregnant. Their partner is likelier adjusting for age to have a criminal record, is less educated, and is likelier to also be sleeping with other people. The couple is likelier to have unprotected sex. That suggests to me that these relationships are indeed at a much higher risk of involving informed consent violations, though the research isn’t conclusive.
This study finds that teenagers dating partners significantly older were much less likely to use condoms than teenagers dating partners of the same age and this one finds “In age-adjusted analyses, adolescents with older partners were four times more likely to test positive for chlamydia (P < 0.04) and were more than twice as likely to report that their partner was also having sex with other women (P < 0.04).”
This research found that age-gap relationships were associated with severe problems for girls age 11-12, significant problems for girls age 13-15, and found no statistically distinguishable effect between girls aged 16-18 with similar-aged partners and significantly older partners.
This study is even older but found that girls with partners who were more than three and a half years older than them were much likelier than girls with partners around their age to abuse alcohol and drugs and to drop out of school. Correlation isn’t causation: maybe the troubled kids date adults. But all of these are teenage mothers, so even among that cohort an older partner predicts lots more problems and there’s a plausible mechanism for a causal relationship: adults can get access to drugs and alcohol easily, and can leverage this access in exchange for sex with much-younger partners. I am inclined to say that a relationship involving an underage partner, a large age gap, and drug and alcohol addiction is especially unlikely to involve informed consent.
This one finds that in relationships with an age gap of four years or more where the younger partner is underage, the older partner has more arrests and less education than a similar-aged partner. (adjusting for having been alive longer).
None of this is conclusive and it’s more than a decade old. But a higher likelihood of unintended pregnancy, a higher rate of dropping out of school, higher rates of drug and alcohol abuse, and partners who are less educated and more often in jail suggests to me that these relationships are less likely than typical relationships to be a consequence of informed consent.
Of course, one could argue this is only because law-abiding adults will not do something that is legally regarded as statutory rape, and so the adults who will are likelier to be abusive generally. Depending whether in your country your experiences counted as statutory rape, this may or may not have been a factor in your situation. And statistics are statistics; I think it is morally unjustified, based on these, for a person to date someone underage and four or more years younger than them, but I don’t think that every such relationship will be negative and I’m not going to tell you that you are mistaken about your experiences.
femmenietzsche