South Sudan is experiencing ethnic cleansing in several parts of the country and risks becoming a Rwanda-like catastrophe, a team of U.N. human rights investigators said. “There is already a steady process of ethnic cleansing underway in several areas of South Sudan using starvation, gang rape and the burning of villages,” said Yasmin Sooka, the lead U.N. investigator, earlier this week. “The scale of gang rape of civilian women as well as the horrendous nature of the rapes by armed men belonging to all groups is utterly repugnant,” he said. Rape is “one of the tools being used for ethnic cleansing,” the U.N. investigators said, adding that sexual violence in the East African nation “has reached epic proportions.”

A U.N. survey found that 70 percent of the women in Juba had experienced sexual assault since the country’s Civil War began in December 2013, the team said.

The announcement comes after the special investigators finished a 10-day visit to South Sudan Wednesday. The U.N. adviser on the prevention of genocide, Adama Dieng, warned that the country is at risk of a genocide.

When the team visited the northern town of Bentiu, a woman described in a public meeting how she had been raped by soldiers. “There is no stigma around rape because for us it is normal; it is happening every day to us,” she told the team.

In the southern town of Yei, a town that has seen significant fighting near the border of Uganda and the Congo, women told The Associated Press last month how they lived in fear of being raped by government soldiers.

When the special investigators finished their 10-day visit, they found that the South Sudan government is intentionally moving civilians from the Dinka ethnic group out of Yei, Ken Scott, a member of the U.N. team, told The Associated Press Friday in Nairobi.

The core definition of ethnic cleansing is displacement along ethnic lines, said Scott. “It can take many forms, obviously killing people is the most extreme, raping very close to that, destruction of property, destruction of schools, ¨ he said.

After fighting in July killed hundreds of people in the capital of Juba, women said in interviews that they had been raped and gang-raped by government soldiers as they traveled to collect food outside a U.N. displacement camp. There is a “growing trend of indiscipline” within South Sudan’s military, according to a government report obtained by AP.