Hilary

If you have to react to this then you are done. If you are already mentally connected to uke then you can control him. Looking him in the eye is a distraction, your mind is focused on his face (the brain spends a lot of time on faces, they are great distracters). You should be controlling him by slight moments and leading him to inconvenient postures before the attack. I assume the knife was not in the attacker's hand (if it was, why would anyone let him get that close) so he had to reach for it. That requires uke to move and that is when you enter or exit, and no, it is not easy or a sure thing. Obviously the kid was not trained and even if, not likely to have the presence of mind to not look at the face, keep hands in front , pick up on subtle cues of intent and lead uke through small movements etc. To defend against sudden unexpected attack requires skills at the no mind level and even then nothing is certain.