Gotta disagree. At issue is having lunch with their father. What is their excuse other than hatred and contempt? You want to condone that?
For their contempt of their father they are willing to defy the court ...and were found in contempt. Seeing a pattern here?
The judge is doing society and the children a favor removing them from a hateful and contemptuous household. If the children are allowed to have hatred and contempt rule their world their lives will be forfeit.
Read the transcript. No one in that room wanted the children to go to CV—even the mother (overheard by the judge) asked the children to go to lunch with their father. The father has always asked the judge not to take this step.
All that the children had to do was to have lunch with their father in the courthouse cafeteria and behave like decent human beings to him. Each of the children refused independently. The judge made her comments about CV in an attempt to let them know what they were choosing when they decided against going downstairs and acting like decent human beings sith their father for an hour.
The children can get out any time by resuming a relationship with their father.
It seems like the judge has tried everything for quite some time to get the children to see their father, and everything has failed.