Of all the images of sex offenders to emerge from the catalogue of cases in recent years, the notion of the "paedophile priest" is by far the most powerful. This process of amplifying the deviancy of priests more than other categories of sex offenders is intensifying if anything, and continues to take place primarily through the ongoing construction of Father Brendan Smyth as the greatest demon ever in Irish society.

The most recent example of this is the astonishing and deeply worrying decision to award the News Photograph of the Year Award to Steve Humphries of the Irish Independent for his picture of Brendan Smyth being led from court. In dutifully rerunning the victorious photograph The Irish Times, like all the print media, yet again referred to Smyth as the "paedophile priest", a term which I believe adds considerably to the danger of the image.

It is highly questionable whether this photograph should ever have been published, let alone won such a prestigious award, and it raises fundamental questions about child protection and how images of deviance, whether from among priests or other social groups in Irish society, are socially constructed by the media.

It was obvious even to television viewers that Smyth was taunted by those present as he was led from court. "Give us a kiss, Brendan," is just one of the things I understand was thrown at him, and the hapless Smyth duly obliged by making growling noises and snarling at the cameras. This, then, is the context from which the best news photograph of the year emerged.

The judges described it as "a powerful photograph of a loathsome individual", while the Irish Independent (February 21st), flushed with the success of its photographer, re-ran the photograph along with the headline "Captured, the face of an evil monster".

That Smyth did evil, loathsome things is not of course in doubt. The important point here is that the (literally) provocative conditions under which this photograph was taken and the grounds on which the award were given are surely wrong. It is the face of a child sex abuser who was provoked into pulling horrible faces which the media then constructed to be the loathsome face of evil.

In reality, the faces of child sex abusers are invariably those of timid, kindly looking, "nice" men. The idea, therefore, that this photograph somehow represents the truth about this particular type of person is dangerously misleading. The more we are encouraged to watch out for the face of evil as embodied in the archetypal dirty old man who is a stranger, the less able we will be to protect children from abuse by those ostensibly inconspicuous men, invariably related to or otherwise known to their victims, who perpetrate the bulk of offences.

Thus, however understandable the desire is to do it, the creation of such demons does not help us in the search for solutions. It detracts from the real challenge of achieving effective child protection, which has to involve recognising the banal ordinariness of the appearance of offenders and how they exploit this as a way of succeeding in their evil deeds.

At best, then, the photograph reflects how we feel about Smyth and this is surely why it performs such an important social function. In this respect, the photograph and award serve to reveal much that is problematic about how the media construct a particular view of social reality to the exclusion of others.

Smyth and the notion of the demon "paedophile priest" have become the embodiment of evil in a manner which selectively constructs symbols of danger for children. At its core, the notion of the "paedophile priest" suggests an inherent connection between priestly celibacy and sex offending. But while the debate relentlessly questions celibacy and demonises priests in this way, there has been no real questioning of why some actively heterosexual men who abuse children within the family perpetrate such horrendous crimes.

At its worst, active heterosexual masculinity has actually been venerated in the face of palpable abuse, as when Mr Justice O'Flaherty justified the reduction of the sentence in the X case as the perpetrator was a "good family man".

When, in 1995, I pointed out (in an article in Studies magazine), that most of the then recent high-profile cases (including Kelly Fitzgerald, the Kilkenny and McColgan cases), did in fact involve farmers who were "good family men", yet we hadn't created a "paedophile farmer" label, I was publicly criticised by the Irish Farmers' Association for bringing the good name of farmers into disrepute.

But in its criticism it managed only to prove my point. There are powerful interests at work which serve to prevent us from even questioning (let alone changing), the fundamental basis of our society, in this case the danger that married heterosexual men from all walks of life can represent for far too many children, and what needs to be done about it. Meanwhile, it makes us feel comfortable to channel our social anxiety and rage selectively on to one group - celibate priests - through the construction of the demon paedophile priest.

The point here is not to defend the church against how it mishandled clerical child sexual abuse, or that we should be looking for balance by creating images of evil paedophile farmers, swimming coaches, or whatever. It is rather to appeal for a type of reportage which is sensitive to the social consequences of the selective construction of images and to insist the last thing we should be doing is encouraging the dangerous misrepresentation of complex realities through awarding prizes to photographs which would probably be better not even published.

Harry Ferguson is a senior lecturer in the department of applied social studies, University College Cork.