IATSO Lifetime Achievement Award

The IATSO Lifetime Significant Achievement Award recognizes and honors an individual who has made an important contribution within the field of the treatment of sexual offenders over the course of their career. The award is presented to an individual whose career work and dedication have significantly influenced or impacted advancements in the field, while promoting the safety and well-being of those affected by sexual abuse and the larger community.

2024:

The 5th Lifetime Achievement Award was given to Knut Hermstad at the 17th IATSO Conference in Trondheim, Norway.

Knut Hermstad is a specialist in clinical sexology and one of the leading professionals in the field of treatment of persons who have committed sexual offences in Norway. Back in the early 1990-ties, he was leading one of the first government-supported treatment projects in Norway for this group. Since that, he has been central to the development of treatment programs for young people with harmful sexual behavior as well as for adult offenders. He made his PhD in forensic sexology on a research work on men sentenced to long-term prison punishment for child sex offences. Now he is working as a senior adviser at the University Hospital of Trondheim. He is doing education, supervision and support to health professionals in primary care and in specialized institutions, besides having his own private, therapeutically praxis as in the field.

2021:

The 4th Lifetime Achievement Award was given to Doug P. Boer at the 16th IATSO Conference in Frankfurt, Germany.

Professor Boer began working at the University of Canberra in September of 2012 after 7 years at the University of Waikato (New Zealand) where he also taught in the Clinical Psychology Programme. Prior to 2006 he worked for the Correctional Service of Canada for about 15 years. He has about 110 publications including articles, book chapters, edited books and test manuals. He helped to co-author the “Sexual Violence Risk – 20 (SVR-20, 1997 and SVR-20 V2, 2017) and the “Assessment of Risk and Manageability for Individuals with Developmental and Intellectual Limitations who Offend Sexually (ARMIDILO-S)”, and the “G” version of the ARMIDILO. Most recently, he has been involved in designing a supervision triage tool for the Victoria Police (the SHARP) and other assessment research with Defense sector in Australia. He also serves on a number of editorial boards, including the “British Journal of Forensic Practice” and the Journal of Applied Research in Intellectual Disabilities. Professor Boer is also a past President of the International Association for the Treatment of Sexual Offenders (IATSO).

2018:

The 3rd Lifetime Achievement Award was given to R. Karl Hanson at the 15th IATSO Conference in Vilnius, Lithuania.

R. Karl Hanson, Ph.D., C.Psych., is one of the leading researchers in the field of sexual offender risk assessment and treatment. He has published more than 175 articles, including several highly influential reviews, and has contributed to the development of the most widely used risk assessment tools for sexual offenders (Static-99R; Static-2002R; STABLE-2007). Based in Ottawa, Canada, he worked for Public Safety Canada between 1991 and 2017, and is now adjunct faculty in the psychology departments of Carleton University (Ottawa) and Ryerson University (Toronto).

2016:

The 2nd Lifetime Achievement Award was given to Friedemann Pfäfflin at the 14th IATSO Conference in Copenhagen, Denmark.

Friedemann Pfäfflin, Prof. Dr. med., founding president of IATSO. He had his training as psychoanalyst at the Michael Balint Institute in Hamburg, Germany, and his training as psychiatrist at the University Clinic in Hamburg, Germany, where he worked for appr. 20 years in the Department of Sex Research before, in 1992, moving to Ulm University. There, he was head of the Department of Forensic Psychotherapy until 2010. He is the co-founder of three scientific journals (1) Recht & Psychiatry [Law & Psychiatry], founded in 1983, and still a co-editor, (2) Zeitschrift für Sexualforschung [Journal of Sex Research], founded in 1988, co-editor until 1991, and (3) The International Journal of Transgenderism, founded in 1997, coeditor until 2007, has more than 420 publications, and written/edited/coedited 19 books. The major topics of his research are sex research, transsexualism and transgenderism, the history of German psychiatry during Nazi times, and forensic psychiatry and psychotherapy.

2014:

The 1st Lifetime Achievement Award was given to William L. Marshall at the 13th IATSO Conference in Porto, Portugal.

William L. Marshall was Director of Rockwood Psychological Services. Bill has 417 publications including 20 books, the latest of which (Marshall, Marshall, Serran & O'Brien 2011 "A strength-based approach to the treatment of sexual offenders" American Psychological Association, Washington, D.C.) won the "Book of the Year" award from the Society for Sex Therapy and Research. Bill is (or has been) on the Editorial Boards of 17 international journals and was in 2003 elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada for his contributions to science. In 2006, Bill was appointed an Officer of the Order of Canada in recognition of his contributions to making society safer both nationally and internationally. This is the highest honor a Canadian citizen can receive. He was IATSO president from 2008 to 2012.