The number of children illegally taken out of the Netherlands or illegally brought here by a parent fell by almost 25% last year, according to new figures from the child kidnapping monitoring centre.

Last year 174 children were removed from their Dutch home and taken abroad and 74 children were brought to the Netherlands. In 2017 a total of 288 children were illegally taken abroad or brought to the Netherlands.

Most children were taken to Germany, Poland and Belgium and in two-thirds of cases the perpetrator is the mother. Of the children moved to the Netherlands, most come from Belgium, Britain and France.

More than half the children taken abroad are under the age of five.

The number of threats made by parents was also down sharply, from 488 in 2017 to 287 last year. This, the centre says, is due to a decision to step up preventative mediation and tighten controls.

‘Child kidnapping remains a far reaching event,’ the centre’s director Coskun Çörüz said in a press statement. ‘But the decline is a positive development and shows that focusing on prevention works.’