"In other nations, the story about Ms. Kelsey wouldn't have received any attention from the press or the media or the digital public at large."
I disagree with this part. Many countries, including many European and English speaking countries, are more age gap negative now than compared to the past. Similar stories in countries like the UK, Australia, Canada, New Zealand would get media attention, especially in the UK (The DailyMail, a British news tabloid, has shown a number of stories over the years involving female teachers caught with underaged male students from the UK, US, etc). A story like Kelsey's would also get media attention in countries like Italy, Netherlands, Greece, Spain. Media in many countries use female teachers with underaged male students for the main reason because it gets clicks, views and engagement. Half the social media comments will call the boy lucky and praise the female teacher, the other half will shame the female teacher and call her a predator/pedo. I've seen similar in Spanish speaking countries too. The media prop up a female teacher caught with a male student, and, as usual, half the social media comments call the boy lucky and praise the female teacher, the other half shame the female teacher.
To show how much things have changed, and how more puritan countries are, even European ones - see this story from Italy back in 2020: A LAMBORGHINI ad campaign featuring teenage girls posing in front of supercars in crop tops in Italy has sparked a furious backlash: https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/13274572/lamborghini-teen-girls-posing-ad-campaign/
These types of stories have also occurred in the UK, Spain, Australia, etc. Whether it's banning ads for showing young teen girls modelling, or banning "flat chested" women in media, or whatever.
Well, if you're talking about austerity with the sex laws in English-speaking nations like the United Kingdom, Australia, and New Zealand, you won't get any argument out of me. Like the United States, those nations are a part of the Anglosphere; and when it comes to their statutory-rape laws, the apple doesn't fall very far from the tree in an Anglospheric sense. Nonetheless, the United States is still worse than any of the other nations outside the Anglosphere in that same respect. Otherwise, Germany would not have provided legal protection to Steven Robert Whitsett from the U.S. authorities and he would be sitting in a Florida prison cell at this very moment. Go to his YouTube channel named Common Sense Laws and watch his videos, and you'll see how diametrically different non-English speaking nations are from the United States when it comes to their sex laws. You'll be surprised about how much more reasonable these non-English-speaking nations are with their sex laws than the United States. In several of his videos, Mr. Whitsett does explain that German sex laws do differentiate between teenage minors and small children under 11 years old whereas in many jurisdictions of the United States, American sex laws don't.
Are their foreign nations that have separate statutory-rape laws that address sexual liaisons between teachers and underage students? Of course, there are. I recall one time when I was browsing through some books at a book store in the United Nations building back when I was living in New York, I came across this one book that indicated that at the time it was illegal for an adult schoolteacher to have sexual intercourse with a student younger than 21 years of age despite that the actual statutory age of consent in that nation was 13 years old. I once watched a movie from Spain that indicated that their sex laws were set up the same way as Kenya's sex laws were in that regard.