5 PRINCIPLE 5 AND RELATED GUIDELINES: INTERVENTION TO ADDRESS FACTORS INCREASING VULNERABILITY185 States and intergovernmental organizations shall ensure that their interventions address the factors that increase vulnerability to trafficking, including inequality, poverty and all forms of discrimination.185 5.1. PURPOSE AND CONTEXT While our understanding of trafficking is incomplete, it is clear that certain factors help to shape the vulnerability to trafficking of an individual, a social group, a community or a society. These factors include human rights violations such as poverty, inequality, discrimination and gender-based violence – all of which help create economic deprivation and social conditions that limit individual choice and make it easier for traffickers and exploiters to operate. Factors that shape vulnerability to trafficking tend to impact differently and disproportionately on groups that already lack power and status in society, including women, children, migrants, refugees and internally displaced persons. This section draws on a more detailed discussion of the obligation to address vulnerability to trafficking in Gallagher, International Law of Human Trafficking, chap. 8. 185 Vulnerability to trafficking can be short- or long-term, specific or general, procedural, political, economic, or structural. In order to ensure that responses are targeted, appropriate, and effective, it is important to understand the nature of particular forms of vulnerability. An example of a short-term, specific vulnerability is one caused by a lack of information about safe migration options and the dangers associated with trafficking.186 This vulnerability could be addressed through initiatives aimed at improving the information position of potential migrants, including those who could be trafficked, with appropriate precautions and advice on how to avoid falling under the control of traffickers. Poverty and lack of access to avenues for safe, legal, and non-exploitative migration contribute to vulnerability in a far more complex way, and long-term and more comprehensive approaches will be needed in order to deal effectively with them. This has been recently recognized by the General Assembly, which called on Governments “to undertake or strengthen campaigns aimed at clarifying opportunities, limitations and rights in the event of migration, as well as information on the risks of irregular migration and the ways and means used by traffickers, so as to enable women to make informed decisions and to prevent them from becoming victims of trafficking” (General Assembly resolution 63/156, para. 16). 186 COMMENTARY 105