ZAM ZAM DISPLACEMENT CAMP, Sudan (CNN) — Sudan’s Darfur crisis has exploded on many fronts — violence, hunger, displacement and looting — but United Nations peacekeepers say the biggest issue now affecting the region is the systematic rape of women and children.

Thousands of women as young as 4 caught in the middle of the struggle between rebel forces and government-backed militias have become victims of rape, they say, with some aid groups claiming that it is being used as a weapon of ethnic cleansing.

“That is one of the biggest issues in Darfur: the rapes, and crimes against women and children,” said Michael Fryer, police commissioner of UNAMID, the United Nations peacekeeping force deployed to try to tackle the violence.

Relief workers say they are powerless to stop the attacks and say that if they do speak out, they fear that the Sudanese government will tell them to leave the country.

Humanitarian group Refugees International said in a report last year that rape was “an integral part of the pattern of violence that the government of Sudan is inflicting upon the targeted ethnic groups in Darfur.”

Some relief workers say that almost every woman living in aid camps has been raped or become a victim of gender-based violence. Many teenagers, while out running errands such as collecting firewood, are raped multiple times by militiamen, the workers say.

They say the situation has now become so bad that many women are now resigned to rape as a way of life and men are unwilling to accompany them because they fear that they will be killed if they try to defend them.

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