A new report on the way young Australians think about violence against women and gender equality gave us the full bottle so I'd like to focus on the bottle half full. In the time since the last report, there has been a significant increase in the percentage of young men who get that equality matters.

The figures show us 86 per cent of young men understand that repeatedly texting and emailing your partner is not on. Four out of five young men understand it's also not on to log in to your partner's socials or install spyware on her phone. And now 85 per cent of Australians understand that it's OK for a woman to change her mind about sex even if she initiated it in the first place. These are good results and they are the result of so much hard work, from parents to schools to universities, from those who work in respectful relationships programs (those folks have had a reputational belting for no good reason so let's appreciate them here).

The first survey was published in 2009, the next in 2013 and between those there was hardly any movement in attitudes. But now, publishing the 2017 results, you can see big exciting shifts. In 2013, 40 per cent of respondents thought rape resulted in men not being able to control their needs. That's down to 28 per cent. The number of people who think women say no when they really mean yes has nearly halved, down to 12 per cent. Fewer people believe domestic violence is a private matter to be handled in the family. Even in areas which are not overtly about consent and control, there has been a shift in consciousness. In 2013, at the height of the campaign against the first woman prime minister Julia Gillard, one in four people thought men make better political leaders than women. That's shrunk to 13 per cent (and do they need to be introduced to Jacinda?). A smaller decrease but still an improvement when respondents were asked whether discrimination against women is no longer a problem in the workplace in Australia - 11 per cent agreed in 2017, compared to 14 per cent in 2013.

There are definitely still some weird ideas out there. More than a quarter of young people blame women for being naked in photos rather than the douchebag who shared those same photos. (Until that number is down to zero, maybe we should encourage young women to go on a sext strike). A third of young men say women who make accusations of rape have really led the bloke on and then had regrets. A massive 40 per cent of men think it is "natural" for a man to want to appear in control of his partner in front of his male friends. And while there has been improvement in 20 of the 36 questions asked in both the 2013 and 2017 surveys and improvement on the overall measures of gender equality and attitudes to violence against women, that doesn't mean it's fixed or even nearly fixed.

While we wait for everyone to catch up with respect, there are people out there, young people, working to educate their peers. Andrew Taukolo, 26, from Brisbane, was a youth ambassador for R4Respect, a group which works hard with their peers to mobilise against gender-based violence. Now he works there. R4Respect goes out to schools and universities, to sporting clubs and other community organisations. After doing this work for a while, Taukolo has a message for other young men.

"We live in a bubble or a box and are unaware of what young women go through," he says.

He asks men in his workshops the question we all ask when talking about this stuff. Hands up if you get fearful walking down to your local store at night.

"The guys say, nah, nothing to worry about. The girls put their hands up. As a young man it is hard to hear coming from young women and there is often some pushback."

But then he asks them to look at the figures. And he talks about planting the seeds of understanding.

"You can't expect a school workshop or a community workshop even to be a sole provider of this for young people."

There's still much more we can do and that includes teaching toddlers to have respectful relationships (and won't that frighten some). As in, just because someone doesn't want to share their Thomas the Tank Engine, that does not mean it's OK to pull her hair. I think childcare educators already do brilliant work in this area and as Christine Robinson, the early childhood degree coordinator at the University of Notre Dame, Western Australia says, building relationships is pretty central to their work. They work on encouraging "respect for others, co-operation and care" and to promote "children's ability to express their emotions constructively".

Getting that respect for diversity early on makes a big difference to society, says Robinson.

We must start earlier than university. University is way too late. I mention universities because there's been a national roll out of a compulsory university module called Consent Matters, which is more about compliance than anything else.

As Anastasia Powell, RMIT criminologist and the lead author of the report, says: "Evidence tells us that a one-off online module does not change deeply engrained behaviour around sexual violence."

We all have more work to do but finally, it looks like some of what we do is working.