Liv Jessen (born 21 September 1947) is a Norwegian

social worker Social work is an academic discipline and practice-based profession concerned with meeting the basic needs of individuals, families, groups, communities, and society as a whole to enhance their individual and collective well-being. Social wo ...

, and former head of ProSenteret in

Oslo Oslo ( or ; ) is the capital and most populous city of Norway. It constitutes both a county and a municipality. The municipality of Oslo had a population of in 2022, while the city's greater urban area had a population of 1,064,235 in 2022 ...

—an organization that deals with issues related to prostitution. Jessen was born in

Sandefjord Sandefjord () is a List of municipalities of Norway, municipality in Vestfold county, Norway. It is located in the Traditional districts of Norway, traditional district of Vestfold. The administrative centre of the municipality is the Sandefjord ...

. In 2004 she was awarded

Amnesty International Amnesty International (also referred to as Amnesty or AI) is an international non-governmental organization focused on human rights, with its headquarters in the United Kingdom. The organization says that it has more than ten million members a ...

Norway's Human Rights prize, in 2007 she received the ''Equality Award'' from the

Confederation of Vocational Unions The Confederation of Vocational Unions (, YS) is a national trade union center, an umbrella organization of trade union, labour unions in Norway. It was established in 1977 as a non-partisan alternative to the Norwegian Confederation of Trade Uni ...

(''YS'') and in 2013 the King's Medal of Merit (''Kongens fortjenstmedalje'').Kongens Fortjenstmedalje til Liv Jessen
Velferdsetaten, Oslo kommune. ''accessed December 30, 2013''

ProSenteret

She led ProSenteret from 1984 until the end of February 2014. (The center is run by both the national government and the municipal government—''statlig''/''kommunal''.) In 2001, the center's

supervised injection site Supervised injection sites (SIS) or drug consumption rooms (DCRs) are a health and social response to drug-related problems. They are fixed or mobile spaces where people who use drugs are provided with sterile drug use equipment and can use illic ...

was closed, after TV2 had reported about its operating for two months, unlawfully. She has said that the publicity around this, later contributed to such injection sites becoming legal in Norway. Since March 2014 she is not a formal employee of the center, but she will retain her office space until the end of the year, for the purpose of writing until she at the end of the year becomes a retiree.

References

1947 births Norwegian social workers Living people People from Sandefjord {{Norway-bio-stub