Really Bad.

Below I link to a horrible video of a person getting stabbed in the face.  If you've seen it you already know it's extremely tough to watch.  However, I'm posting it because of a few things I noticed.  Don't watch it if you don't want to, but if you choose to...watch for these things:

The attacker - clearly he isn't trying to kill her.  If he wanted to do that he easily could have.  I think he's trying to punish her, make her ugly...as in "oh, you're going to leave me?  Well no one will ever want you again!".  I don't know if that's correct, I don't know anything about the situation, I just notice he's not killing her, he's only stabbing her in the face.  Or maybe he's just crazy.

The victim - While she's trying to get her face out of the way by moving her head around & covering with her hands, that's about as far as she's taking her defense.  I'm not trying to criticize her, the poor woman is probably in shock and incapable of doing anything else.  I have to assume under the circumstances that if she could do more she would.  I wonder if she had some training if she'd be able to get her feet up close to her body to maneuver better, use her arms to deflect the weapon, buck, etc.?  

The bystanders - Here's where it actually gets interesting for me.  What fails: There are a couple of young men who make little pathetic useless kicks at the attacker's body, and I've heard lots of people criticize them for not doing more.  Personally, I feel those boys were very brave.  They tried to stop a guy with a knife who clearly has no problem slicing people up.  If he'd sliced out at them as they kicked and opened up an artery on the inside of their thigh, they'd be dead.  How many strangers are you willing to die for?  What I think is that they simply didn't know what to do to help her, so they tried as best they could.  Which of course, was sadly not helpful at all.  
What succeeds:  One guy finally sneaks up & grabs him from behind ...crap, maybe you haven't seen it yet.  

Watch it if you want to, I'm about to spoil the ending.

Don't look below this line unless you want to know what happens!!!

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The man who grabs his hoodie from behind finally succeeds in pulling him off.  Then, kneeling on his neck, pins him.  

Do you notice the woman hops right up like she's merely tripped on the sidewalk?  Then a few moments later she slowly sinks to the ground.  Adrenaline is super powerful, but it doesn't last, and losing that much blood doesn't help, obviously. 

And a truly extraordinary thing, the bystanders, having gotten the attacker away from his victim, protect him from mob justice and don't permit the crowd to beat him, which frankly he has coming, the bastard.  Incredible self-control or ethics or I don't know what.  Very impressive.

It bothered me so much that only one guy on the scene knew what to do that we worked a bloodless version of this in 2 of my classes last week, to practice how and when to jump in in such a situation.  It was really interesting.  Knifing each other seemed to be out of the question so in one class we had the attacker beat the crap out of the victim with pads & lash out at anyone who came to help.  No, the real attacker never did that, but the "bystanders" needed to be somewhat afraid to move in, because they damn sure would be in real life.   In the second class we used a little Halloween party knife I had left over from my Psycho Ex-Girlfriend costume.

Don't you love me anymore?  

It wouldn't actually cut anyone, but it wouldn't feel good if it slammed into you either & I told the attacker to get wild with the knife to make the folks who tried to save the victim think twice before they moved in.  

After the dust settled I asked the class, "what failed?"  

They said, "being timid" "being slow" "hoping someone else would help"  "chasing the hand around to grab the knife, it's going too fast so you get cut"

"What succeeded?"  

"Being sneaky" "Attacking from behind" "Being aggressive" "Totally committing to your attack"  "Having someone else on your side attacking with you"

I'd like to point out these are the same things that fail and succeed in most all self-defense situations. And if you reeeaaally want to take that ball and run with it look at the list of qualities the students gave for a successful defense.  If you're ever attacked you should assume the attacker will strive to do most or all of these things, and defend accordingly.