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My thinking is less from playfighting girls, and more from a childhood spent playing with knives and cutting myself a fair bit in the process. Sharp knives require very little force to cut or to pierce, and the motions needed are natural and instinctive. Fuck up the disarm and you can do all the cutting yourself, just bumping into the edge whilst trying to get to the limb behind it. And sure, a tweener girl is likely to have the aggressive mindset to go on the offense, and may be uncoordinated enough that you can just grab her wrist before she can flinch, and probably that knife is even pretty dull because she probably doesn't know how to sharpen it. Probably.
My claim is not that a girl so armed is certain or even likely to win a fight with an adult man. She is not. My argument is that a tweener girl brandishing a ~7-inch chef's knife is making a very serious threat, because a knife can hurt you very badly with very little force.
The marker test is going to tell you mostly about the point. Get a cardboard box and a hot-glue gun, glue together two layers of cardboard and then cut out the knife shape with a boxcutter. paint the edge with food coloring or acrylic paint or whatever. tell her she gets ice cream if she gets a line on you. there's a big difference between trying to get past a quarter-inch of marker tip, and trying to get past six or seven inches of blade.
I was a den leader through cub scouts. The day we did Totin' Chip, the first boy showed up and I set him at the dining room table with my own boy, and then walked into the kitchen to finish gathering supplies. When I came back, not even 20 seconds later, the both of them were bleeding. It was one of those "I'm not even mad, that's almost impressive" moments.
But yeah, I get that this is likely a situation where my gut confidence is ignorance and arrogance. And yet...
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If the girl is not actively on the attack, just brandishing the knife (as in the video), you have first-mover advantage. So long as she's within reach and you act first, you can get ahold of her wrist 100 times out of 100. It's the same concept as quickdraw guys who can draw and fire a holstered double-action revolver before an alert adult can react, so long as they choose when to draw:
https://youtube.com/watch?v=ELaiJZ8tjSk&t=249
This doesn't win a knife fight against somebody strong enough to fight back once you've got a grip on them, but in the case in question it's pretty hard for me to see much (physical) risk.
Do we know how much of that is from practice though? And genetically faster reflexes/selection bias if you're interested in being a "quickdraw guy"? Can the average man really reach to disarm a knife faster than the knife holder can cut the disarming arm? I'm asking because I'm not sure, I don't know the answer here?
Drawing a gun and firing a (roughly) aimed shot inside human reaction (+movement) time does take a lot of practice -- reaching out and grabbing somebody's wrist, I'd think not so much. Faster reflexes don't really come into it -- the first mover is deciding when to act; his 'reaction' time is zero.
Yes, if he's within reach -- this is why police etc are taught to create and maintain distance from people that they're interacting with when they draw their handgun.
It's important to note (as I mentioned) that this doesn't necessarily get you much against a physically comparable opponent -- if you have a hold of his knife arm, his other arm is still free to pummel you with -- and if he overpowers your grip on his knife hand, you are in a very convenient spot to be stabbed. But a 12 yo girl is a whole different story.
If the "Ultimate Self Defence Championship" is anything to go by, then defending yourself, unarmed, against a fit and aggressive adult man is just about impossible.
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